I don't buy it in the least - even one of the questionable 100 mw green pointers that are available on the web wouldn't be blinding people 15 miles away - the beam divergence is going to be too much, plus the atmosphere is going to absorb a lot of the energy. I think it's quite possible that the pilot might have seen an instantaneous low-level green flash, but nothing more and certainly nothing dangerous.
The green pointers actually are not stronger at all - they're still 5mw or less, and most of them are pulsed, which brings the effective power over time down quite a bit. The human eye is more sensitive to green than to red, so they *look* brighter, but they're really not. They're expensive because they're a totally different type of laser than the average keychain pointer, and unless the YLF/YAG lasing crystals and KTP doubling crystals in them come down in price, I wouldn't count on them getting cheaper anytime too soon.
No, I don't think that's plausible - the amount of error that was present in the mirror isn't the right kind nor of sufficient degree to make up for the fact that the Hubble has a fixed focus of about 6K miles or so, and so wouldn't have a chance of focusing on something only a couple of hundred miles away (i.e. the ground from LEO). The repair mission didn't involve the primary mirror itself, rather they brought a set of special lenses for the cameras on the telescope to correct for the imperfection in the primary mirror.
Agreed. Now, let's talk about *real* theft - let's look at how much is taken from society as a whole by the incessant extensions of copyright terms, and the now-accepted Congressional opinion that copyright holders and their heirs should profit from their creations in perpetuity instead of returning them to their legal owner, society in general. The ??AA members have managed to buy themselves legislation that flies directly in the face of the design of the copyright system as defined in the Constitution, and then have the nads to bitch and whine that the public is stealing from them? Puh-leeze. What really galls me is that a lot of the MPAA members are simply recycling content that was already in the public domain, and thus they're playing the copyright card from both sides of the table. You never see this aspect of the copyright situation discussed in these articles, and the annoying painter and stuntman that we all get subjected to in the theaters sure as hell aren't talking about it.
Wow, that takes me back. My Bolo experience is limited to playing the Apple II version back in 1983, though. No network or multiplayer, but still a hell of a lot of fun.:-)
That sounds more likely to be a reflex sight, as a true laser sight is visible to anyone nearby (unless it's an IR laser sight and you have the viewing hardware). Reflex sights use a piece of glass or plastic to reflect a focused LED to the shooter's eye, allowing the shooter to put the dot on his target without having to defocus his eyes from it - they're basically a tiny HUD. They're a *lot* cheaper than laser sights, but that's largely because there's not much to them other than a piece of glass or plastic and a red LED, and possibly a plastic lens.
"Not guilty" didn't mean he didn't do it, just that the state couldn't meet the required burden of proof. In OJ's case, the verdict was largely due to the ineptness of the LAPD during the initial investigation and the incompetent prosecutorial team.
In a civil trial, you have to prove your case through a preponderance of evidence, and that *is* an easier burden to meet, but then we're not talking about putting someone in jail for the rest of their life, either. Having said that, the plaintiffs in OJ's civil trial were able to put forth sufficient evidence that OJ was involved in the wrongful deaths of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman such that the jury felt it was more likely that he was responsible than he wasn't.
I'm talking about a decent laser unit, such as those made by LaserMax or Crimson Trace, not some trigger-guard-mounted crap that's going to jiggle out of alignment after a couple of shots and won't fit into a standard holster, or that has wiring that will wear through after a short period of use.
I wouldn't expect that it's very common, and I can't recall ever hearing of it happening - a laser sight for a pistol usually runs around $250-300 from the manufacturer, and is usually put on a $500-$1500 pistol. The average crook simply won't put that kind of money into a weapon, hence the popularity of Saturday Night Specials and such among the low-lifes.
While the individual in question could possibly escape criminal prosecution on the argument that he believed there was a gun at the other end of the laser beam, he almost certainly would not be able to avoid civil liability.
On the other hand, if cops were allowed to blow away every asshat that pointed a laser at them, maybe that would do a lot to control said asshattery.:-)
Putting the lasers in the trees is one thing, but in the course of working several years for a large laser integration company that dealt with everything from 5 watt green YAGs to 5 kilowatt CO2s, I learned that it's really a good idea to have goggles anytime you're going to be exposed to *any* high-power (i.e. more than 10 mw or so) system - you just don't know when you're going to have a stray reflection that catches you in the eyes or when some idiot working on something fails to put a proper backstop up or disables the shutter and fires a beam at eye level across the work area. While you can see Ar/Kr/HeNe beams pretty easily, it really sucks for IR and UV lasers - your vision gets damaged before you even know you took a beam in the eyes. Near-IR units are *really* bad about that - a CO2 will burn your cornea and hurt like hell, but at least it can be fixed in a lot of cases. A YAG will burn your retina beyond repair and you won't feel a thing until it's too late, and even the green and UV YAGs will still have a pretty substantial IR component unless they're filtered, which I've never seen on a Class IV YAG.
Rear-projection is a whole 'nother story - I'd prefer a 3-chip DLP set in that case. I've yet to see *any* rear-projection set that offers the same off-axis clarity/contrast that plasma and CRT do. To me, just about every rear-projection set I've seen has looked rather fuzzy, the high end WEGAs included. I guess it's a matter of personal preference.
Plasmas are *lots* cheaper than a comparably sized LCD, they offer better contrast, and they offer a much wider viewing angle. Spatial and color resolution is a function of the individual panel, and isn't a function of the technology per se.
Plasmas aren't *that* bad on power consumption. My 42" plasma draws about 300 watts - that's quite a bit of power, but nowhere near what a toaster or hair dryer draws, and less than some people's PCs that I know of.:-)
Just because a TLAM-C costs half a million per unit doesn't mean an industrious group couldn't get something workable flying for a small fraction of that. The U.S. government can rarely be accused of doing things in the most cost-efficient manner.
I bet that a good way to get the attention of the secret service would be to shine a laser on the whitehouse.
So what if someone notices the target being painted? Practically there won't be a lot anyone could do about it except to try to shoot the missile down, as the missile would be on terminal guidance and the laser designator would only be needed for several seconds at the most I think it unlikely that the person aiming the designator would be found in those few seconds.
Would those components be able to take the stress of a missile?
Sure - a missile launch and flight isn't going to subject the instrumentation to a very high G load. Model rocketry fans have been sending up cameras and other doodads sucessfully for years. As far as radar avoidance, one merely has to fly at a low enough altitude.
I still stand by my belief that disabling GPS is more likely to cause problems for the legitimate users of the system than it is to discourage a terrorist attack. There are just too many other ways one can accurately locate a given target, and as you mention with the mortars, one doesn't have to even resort to a high-tech means of attack.
Living free also means living with risk, and the American public would do well to understand that. There's simply no way the government can guarantee peoples' safety, even with the most Draconian measures in place.
As far as the ATM example goes, that's different. We know that the ATM is taking pictures to protect us. It's the bank's security system implemented on our behalf.
No, the ATM is taking pictures to protect the bank.
The idea is to use the inertial system to get close enough to the target such that the optical system can take over, similar to what the U.S. Tomahawks do. As far as the optical system goes, one could probably get away with a webcam in conjunction with a Mini-ITX motherboard and some really sophisticated pattern-matching software, along with a decent amount of flash RAM. If you give the terrorists a bit more money, then you can put a radar altimeter in the missile and you might be able to forgo the optical system altogether. And of course, the good old-fashioned laser designator for terminal guidance still works like a charm 40 years later, and is pretty damn difficult to defeat if implemented properly.
Turning off GPS is not the panacea against terrorist attacks the government may think it is. Remember, these are the guys that turned off SA for all those years for "security purposes", but apparently failed to notice that 80-90% of the areas one would expect to be targeted were already covered by DGPS, and thus got available accuracy far in excess of even non-SA GPS for the price of the differential antenna.
But it might stop the equivalent of a cruise missle or armed UAV from accurately targetting, say, the White House.
If the terrorists have the cash to give us a cruise missile for Christmas, they likely have the cash to give it an inertial/optical guidance system that won't need GPS to be accurate.
Practically, does it make a difference? Most (not all) companies will turn over whatever information they have about you to the government if they have even so much as a pen pointed in their direction. About the only time you'll see a company refuse a government request for a customer's data is if they feel it will somehow be financially beneficial to do so.
Don't forget eBay's statement from last year: "If you are a law-enforcement officer, all you have to do is send us a fax with a request for information, and ask about the person behind the seller's identity number, and we will provide you with his name, address, sales history and other details--all without having to produce a court order."
Doesn't accepting the data taken from an ice core assume that the core is a closed system though? The last I knew, ice was permeable, particularly to gasses.
I can see the practical side of this, but this is effectively saying "we're too cheap to implement the standard properly, so we're going to play fast and loose with it to save some money". Microsoft gets hammered for this kind of stuff (rightly, IMHO), so why not Google?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't buy it in the least - even one of the questionable 100 mw green pointers that are available on the web wouldn't be blinding people 15 miles away - the beam divergence is going to be too much, plus the atmosphere is going to absorb a lot of the energy. I think it's quite possible that the pilot might have seen an instantaneous low-level green flash, but nothing more and certainly nothing dangerous.
I think someone is just trying to make a point.
The green pointers actually are not stronger at all - they're still 5mw or less, and most of them are pulsed, which brings the effective power over time down quite a bit. The human eye is more sensitive to green than to red, so they *look* brighter, but they're really not. They're expensive because they're a totally different type of laser than the average keychain pointer, and unless the YLF/YAG lasing crystals and KTP doubling crystals in them come down in price, I wouldn't count on them getting cheaper anytime too soon.
No, I don't think that's plausible - the amount of error that was present in the mirror isn't the right kind nor of sufficient degree to make up for the fact that the Hubble has a fixed focus of about 6K miles or so, and so wouldn't have a chance of focusing on something only a couple of hundred miles away (i.e. the ground from LEO). The repair mission didn't involve the primary mirror itself, rather they brought a set of special lenses for the cameras on the telescope to correct for the imperfection in the primary mirror.
Agreed. Now, let's talk about *real* theft - let's look at how much is taken from society as a whole by the incessant extensions of copyright terms, and the now-accepted Congressional opinion that copyright holders and their heirs should profit from their creations in perpetuity instead of returning them to their legal owner, society in general. The ??AA members have managed to buy themselves legislation that flies directly in the face of the design of the copyright system as defined in the Constitution, and then have the nads to bitch and whine that the public is stealing from them? Puh-leeze. What really galls me is that a lot of the MPAA members are simply recycling content that was already in the public domain, and thus they're playing the copyright card from both sides of the table. You never see this aspect of the copyright situation discussed in these articles, and the annoying painter and stuntman that we all get subjected to in the theaters sure as hell aren't talking about it.
Don't know about the movie, but I'm sure I will find Natalie Portman to be wonderful and rounded in Ep. III.
Wow, that takes me back. My Bolo experience is limited to playing the Apple II version back in 1983, though. No network or multiplayer, but still a hell of a lot of fun. :-)
That sounds more likely to be a reflex sight, as a true laser sight is visible to anyone nearby (unless it's an IR laser sight and you have the viewing hardware). Reflex sights use a piece of glass or plastic to reflect a focused LED to the shooter's eye, allowing the shooter to put the dot on his target without having to defocus his eyes from it - they're basically a tiny HUD. They're a *lot* cheaper than laser sights, but that's largely because there's not much to them other than a piece of glass or plastic and a red LED, and possibly a plastic lens.
"Not guilty" didn't mean he didn't do it, just that the state couldn't meet the required burden of proof. In OJ's case, the verdict was largely due to the ineptness of the LAPD during the initial investigation and the incompetent prosecutorial team.
In a civil trial, you have to prove your case through a preponderance of evidence, and that *is* an easier burden to meet, but then we're not talking about putting someone in jail for the rest of their life, either. Having said that, the plaintiffs in OJ's civil trial were able to put forth sufficient evidence that OJ was involved in the wrongful deaths of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman such that the jury felt it was more likely that he was responsible than he wasn't.
I'm talking about a decent laser unit, such as those made by LaserMax or Crimson Trace, not some trigger-guard-mounted crap that's going to jiggle out of alignment after a couple of shots and won't fit into a standard holster, or that has wiring that will wear through after a short period of use.
I wouldn't expect that it's very common, and I can't recall ever hearing of it happening - a laser sight for a pistol usually runs around $250-300 from the manufacturer, and is usually put on a $500-$1500 pistol. The average crook simply won't put that kind of money into a weapon, hence the popularity of Saturday Night Specials and such among the low-lifes.
While the individual in question could possibly escape criminal prosecution on the argument that he believed there was a gun at the other end of the laser beam, he almost certainly would not be able to avoid civil liability. On the other hand, if cops were allowed to blow away every asshat that pointed a laser at them, maybe that would do a lot to control said asshattery. :-)
Putting the lasers in the trees is one thing, but in the course of working several years for a large laser integration company that dealt with everything from 5 watt green YAGs to 5 kilowatt CO2s, I learned that it's really a good idea to have goggles anytime you're going to be exposed to *any* high-power (i.e. more than 10 mw or so) system - you just don't know when you're going to have a stray reflection that catches you in the eyes or when some idiot working on something fails to put a proper backstop up or disables the shutter and fires a beam at eye level across the work area. While you can see Ar/Kr/HeNe beams pretty easily, it really sucks for IR and UV lasers - your vision gets damaged before you even know you took a beam in the eyes. Near-IR units are *really* bad about that - a CO2 will burn your cornea and hurt like hell, but at least it can be fixed in a lot of cases. A YAG will burn your retina beyond repair and you won't feel a thing until it's too late, and even the green and UV YAGs will still have a pretty substantial IR component unless they're filtered, which I've never seen on a Class IV YAG.
Ho ho hoax!
[golf clap]
Score: Samari711 - 1, AC - 0....
Rear-projection is a whole 'nother story - I'd prefer a 3-chip DLP set in that case. I've yet to see *any* rear-projection set that offers the same off-axis clarity/contrast that plasma and CRT do. To me, just about every rear-projection set I've seen has looked rather fuzzy, the high end WEGAs included. I guess it's a matter of personal preference.
Plasmas are *lots* cheaper than a comparably sized LCD, they offer better contrast, and they offer a much wider viewing angle. Spatial and color resolution is a function of the individual panel, and isn't a function of the technology per se.
Plasmas aren't *that* bad on power consumption. My 42" plasma draws about 300 watts - that's quite a bit of power, but nowhere near what a toaster or hair dryer draws, and less than some people's PCs that I know of. :-)
Just because a TLAM-C costs half a million per unit doesn't mean an industrious group couldn't get something workable flying for a small fraction of that. The U.S. government can rarely be accused of doing things in the most cost-efficient manner.
I bet that a good way to get the attention of the secret service would be to shine a laser on the whitehouse.
So what if someone notices the target being painted? Practically there won't be a lot anyone could do about it except to try to shoot the missile down, as the missile would be on terminal guidance and the laser designator would only be needed for several seconds at the most I think it unlikely that the person aiming the designator would be found in those few seconds.
Would those components be able to take the stress of a missile?
Sure - a missile launch and flight isn't going to subject the instrumentation to a very high G load. Model rocketry fans have been sending up cameras and other doodads sucessfully for years. As far as radar avoidance, one merely has to fly at a low enough altitude.
I still stand by my belief that disabling GPS is more likely to cause problems for the legitimate users of the system than it is to discourage a terrorist attack. There are just too many other ways one can accurately locate a given target, and as you mention with the mortars, one doesn't have to even resort to a high-tech means of attack.
Living free also means living with risk, and the American public would do well to understand that. There's simply no way the government can guarantee peoples' safety, even with the most Draconian measures in place.
As far as the ATM example goes, that's different. We know that the ATM is taking pictures to protect us. It's the bank's security system implemented on our behalf.
No, the ATM is taking pictures to protect the bank.
The idea is to use the inertial system to get close enough to the target such that the optical system can take over, similar to what the U.S. Tomahawks do. As far as the optical system goes, one could probably get away with a webcam in conjunction with a Mini-ITX motherboard and some really sophisticated pattern-matching software, along with a decent amount of flash RAM. If you give the terrorists a bit more money, then you can put a radar altimeter in the missile and you might be able to forgo the optical system altogether. And of course, the good old-fashioned laser designator for terminal guidance still works like a charm 40 years later, and is pretty damn difficult to defeat if implemented properly.
Turning off GPS is not the panacea against terrorist attacks the government may think it is. Remember, these are the guys that turned off SA for all those years for "security purposes", but apparently failed to notice that 80-90% of the areas one would expect to be targeted were already covered by DGPS, and thus got available accuracy far in excess of even non-SA GPS for the price of the differential antenna.
But it might stop the equivalent of a cruise missle or armed UAV from accurately targetting, say, the White House.
If the terrorists have the cash to give us a cruise missile for Christmas, they likely have the cash to give it an inertial/optical guidance system that won't need GPS to be accurate.
Practically, does it make a difference? Most (not all) companies will turn over whatever information they have about you to the government if they have even so much as a pen pointed in their direction. About the only time you'll see a company refuse a government request for a customer's data is if they feel it will somehow be financially beneficial to do so.
Don't forget eBay's statement from last year: "If you are a law-enforcement officer, all you have to do is send us a fax with a request for information, and ask about the person behind the seller's identity number, and we will provide you with his name, address, sales history and other details--all without having to produce a court order."
Doesn't accepting the data taken from an ice core assume that the core is a closed system though? The last I knew, ice was permeable, particularly to gasses.
I can see the practical side of this, but this is effectively saying "we're too cheap to implement the standard properly, so we're going to play fast and loose with it to save some money". Microsoft gets hammered for this kind of stuff (rightly, IMHO), so why not Google?
Actually, the tax stamp is only $200 for any Class III item.