I don't see any, but I'm not privy to all the classified facts. Presumably it shows enough promise to for development to at least be pursued on the chance it would be a worthwhile part of the weapons mix.
Phalanx is not designed to fire against surface targets; it is a highly specialized, completely automatic anti cruise missile system. You press the ARM button, and it detects and eliminates threats as they occur without further human involvement until you press DISARM or it runs out of ammo (which happens DAMN fast). No one would design a surface engagement system like that.
However, a 25mm chain gun would rip hell out of these matchboxes within seconds. Sayonara. Even 1920 era M2 50 caliber HMGs would murder them. The issue is how long their standoff range is, because both the Phalanx and these other weapons are limited to decidedly close range use.
If the attacking boat has a corner cube reflector there is a good chance of blinding people on the defending ship. Since the system needs to be ready for use without warning, the crew would need to always wear laser goggles.
First, an attacking small craft is NEVER going to appear on the high seas close to a major naval vessel like like an apparition, "without warning".
More importantly, do you really think any people stand out on the deck on any major US Navy vessels (aircraft carriers aside) when combat is going on? Or that these ships have any portholes? Or that the few people on the bridge who are behind glass would not be wearing laser goggles when they need them? The old days of hundreds of people on the deck of a battleship doing lookout duty with binoculars and manning a hundred old fashioned triple-A guns are long past.
An aircraft carrier would never be in the thick of it. There are pickets at some distance to deal with attacking small craft.
Your point that lasers are questionable from a Geneva Convention point of view due to the certain knowledge that they would cause widespread blinding is well taken, but supposedly heavy 50 caliber machine guns are not to be used against personnel - yet they are so used all the time - as are 50 caliber sniper rifles, which are an even more clear violation.
FELs do usually use rare earth magnets, but the total amount of material isn't very large compared to disk drives and other commercial uses.
Also, whether or not you can buy rare earth from China, you can buy all the rare earth magnets you want from China (for example, but not limited to, on ebay).
If you can't get the exact size and shape magnets you want, you can always demagnetize them, grind them up, and turn them back into raw materials. Then you have that which supposedly China doesn't want to sell you, or is limiting the sale of. And, of course, using the material you can make your own magnets of whatever size and shape you want.
Adobe has basically already screwed THEMSELVES. Royally so. From their own decisions over the years. And google is basically just an advertising company. That's their revenue stream. They can't pull out of their other more interesting ventures such as Google Labs fast enough. It's pretty sad, actually.
Look, Adobe moving forward will not be further developing flash support for linux. That doesn't mean existing plugins magically stop working. Even if they take the downloads away, we've already got working plugins we have already downloaded. I know I'm not throwing mine away like a trained money. It doesn't need any fancy installer. It's basically just a huge but simple.so file you drop into the plugin directory.
It's clear that Adobe isn't going to be doing much more with flash on any platform. Simple maintenance and security (hah!) fixes on Windows and OS X, probably, for not much longer. I doubt they'll do anything to break compatibility, and even if they do, web developers are rapidly losing interest in flash anyway. None of them would bother to use any new gee-whiz crap junk. The day that anybody cared has passed. The fact that there is no iOS support for flash is the death knell for flash. And since linux is not a toy operating system, I am not worried much about newly uncovered security exploits. Worst case, I'll just sandbox my flash browsing under a dummy user. No exploit is going to be able to do anything outside that user account.
You can just as well install Firefox under a user account. That's what I did on RHEL6. The installed rpm is Redhat's stodgy old version, and that's what all other user accounts see, but my own user account runs Firefox 11.
I was up to 520 tabs the other day and noticed it was using 3.8GB and the whole computer was slow as HELL, with LONG pauses while typing or moving the mouse.
I have 64 bits, 16GB of RAM, and paging turned off; I was nowhere near running low on RAM.
Butanol has a somewhat lower chemical energy/volume ratio than gasoline, but substantially better than ethanol or methanol. Sure that makes it "one of the highest density methods of storing [chemical] energy", for SOME definition of "one of", but it doesn't make it outstanding by any means.
The fact that you can synthesize a hydrocarbon from a source of carbon (CO2) and hydrogen (H2O) is no surprise to anyone of normal education level.
The choice of engine(s) in that design seems questionable to me. You're only talking 180 hp of fossil fueled engine. Even if the turbines were literally zero weight, you'd only be saving around the 200-300 kg range compared to a diesel, which as everyone has remarked and the designer admits, would have twice the fuel efficiency. So you have to have a fuel tank of twice the size, and twice the weight of fuel, for the same range extension. That reduces the weight saving. I'm going to guess the car weighs around 1500-2000 kg. And they are worried about maybe 10% of that weight?
Also, those turbines are going to be as expensive as hell, but who's counting, since the car is undoubtedly going to cost well into 6 figures.
If you hardly ever travel more than the car's idealized electric-only range of 110 km, it might be a fair tradeoff. Otherwise, a questionable choice. Interesting, though.
Moron. Murder by definition is not defensive. So no, that law has nothing whatsoever to do with murder. Well, it makes it a little less likely that you will be murdered in your own house because you can DEFEND YOURSELF.
At least discuss the topic in accurate terms. There might be a point somewhere in your absurdly overwrought language, but we'll never see it the way you're going on.
Because safety, or rather PRESUMED safety, or some asshole bureaucrat's idea of safety, is the ultimate point, right? It's not about improving life's experiences, it's about ensuring absolutely nobody ever comes to any harm whatsoever, no matter what it takes.
You know, libertarians do not intrude on others' lives, but self-important nazis do. You are the one who should get out of here.
Here's a clue. Safety is an illusion. No one is safe, and you can't force nature to make everyone safe. You could sandbag your front door and curl up in a fetal position in your bed, but your heart could still stop any time. A landing gear could fall off a plane and hit you. Lightning could strike you. Tsunamis. Burst aneurisms. Clots. Bear attacks. Bites by rabid animals. Tetanus from a tiny puncture. Brown recluse spider bites. Stepping on a thin layer hiding a sinkhole.
Yeah, right. You're just doing it because the big meanie started it. Well, guess what, genius. They're still subsidizing; you're an idiot if you think a little tariff is going to make any difference and restore manufacturing in the U.S. like the roaring twenties. So now, everybody in the normal world will have cheap solar while your sorry ass backward dump of a country won't have anybody who can afford to install solar.
"OK, punk. I guess I'll be suing you for duress and threats, then."
Seriously, if someone asked me to sign away my rights in return for money, my response would be "You're putting me on, right? Or are you stupid? Or do you think I'm stupid? Whatever, the answer is no. HELL, NO! That's jobplace discrimination. And I'll be reporting this act of predatory coercion to the attorney general. What's that? You didn't mean it? So I'll be getting the same severance package as everybody else, right?"
Now, if you don't mind, the grown-ups are trying to have a discussion.
Actually, the grown ups are having a blast listening to the bawling squalling kids with their toy OS trying to figure out which hacked-together add-ons to use in order to plug deficiencies in their busted-ass operating system.
Actually, while PC duffers were futzing with 16 bit Computer Innovations C, Lattice C, Microsoft C 1.0 in 1983, which was pretty much just a ripoff of Lattice C, then through the 80s with Microsoft C 2.0 through 6.0, with the first hesitant entry to 32 bits in 5.0 near the end of that period (even though there was no proper Microsoft 32 bit OS available yet at that time), REAL embedded programmers were working with 32 bit 68000, 68010, and 68020 using Green Hills C and compact deterministic real-time multi-tasking kernels such as VRTX.
Green Hills C was a significant improvement on the Portable C Compiler that came with SunOS and other BSD based unixes in those days.
When gcc finally matured, it was an ENORMOUS boon. The action nowadays is moving to Clang/LLVM though. With Clang, you don't have to compile a separate version for every cross-compile target. Every Clang executable is capable of producing code for any of the supported targets just by using the right run-time options. Of course, this doesn't address the point that you still need appropriate assemblers, linkers,libraries, startup code etc for each target. But they are trying to get a handle even on that with the Clang Universal Driver Project.
>> Find me a PC as small as a Mac Mini with comparable specs for $599.
> Any Sandy Bridge Mini ITX system.
Bull. Wrong. Absolutely wrong. You can't jam an off the shelf Mini ITX board with core i3/5/7 CPU and CPU cooler attached, plus power supply, plus hard drive, plus optical drive, into the current Mac Mini outline. Not even close. You couldn't even do it using an external brick power supply. The current Mac Mini form is much too thin, and the previous one was too small in all three dimensions. I actually tried to see how close I could come, and the smallest Mini ITX system I could make which could actually cool itself adequately enough not to burn up, without sounding like a jet engine, turned out to be comparatively gigantic.
A single company that I know of, Aopen, has made very nice minis the size of the ORIGINAL Mac Mini (which I think was a much more impressive form factor than the current one). But they couldn't do it using Mini ITX or anything else off the shelf. They had to engineer their own custom shrunken-laptop-like board inside and cooler, just like the real Mac Mini. I've had both, and they are both triumphs of practical engineering that no mini ITX piece of garbage can come close to. And the cost reflects it.
If you look at Aopen's Mini ITX offerings, you'll find that they have TWICE the enclosed volume, and crappy Atom CPUs. There is a REASON for that. These guys know how to make beautiful minis, but not using that kind of antiquated tech.
>> Know what else has a Core i7 processor? a Mac Mini.
> No it doesn't.
Yes it does. From Apple, right hand column: "2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5... Configurable to 2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i7, only at the Apple Online Store." Of course ten seconds of checking would have told you that.
I had an English teacher who rather unfairly called sentences with more than a couple of clauses "sentence diarrhea", but that would be a stretch in this case. When you come down to it there is nothing grammatically wrong with the sentence. You might want a comma after "applications", but no other punctuation is warranted.
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I don't see any, but I'm not privy to all the classified facts. Presumably it shows enough promise to for development to at least be pursued on the chance it would be a worthwhile part of the weapons mix.
Phalanx is not designed to fire against surface targets; it is a highly specialized, completely automatic anti cruise missile system. You press the ARM button, and it detects and eliminates threats as they occur without further human involvement until you press DISARM or it runs out of ammo (which happens DAMN fast). No one would design a surface engagement system like that.
However, a 25mm chain gun would rip hell out of these matchboxes within seconds. Sayonara. Even 1920 era M2 50 caliber HMGs would murder them. The issue is how long their standoff range is, because both the Phalanx and these other weapons are limited to decidedly close range use.
If the attacking boat has a corner cube reflector there is a good chance of blinding people on the defending ship. Since the system needs to be ready for use without warning, the crew would need to always wear laser goggles.
First, an attacking small craft is NEVER going to appear on the high seas close to a major naval vessel like like an apparition, "without warning".
More importantly, do you really think any people stand out on the deck on any major US Navy vessels (aircraft carriers aside) when combat is going on? Or that these ships have any portholes? Or that the few people on the bridge who are behind glass would not be wearing laser goggles when they need them? The old days of hundreds of people on the deck of a battleship doing lookout duty with binoculars and manning a hundred old fashioned triple-A guns are long past.
An aircraft carrier would never be in the thick of it. There are pickets at some distance to deal with attacking small craft.
Your point that lasers are questionable from a Geneva Convention point of view due to the certain knowledge that they would cause widespread blinding is well taken, but supposedly heavy 50 caliber machine guns are not to be used against personnel - yet they are so used all the time - as are 50 caliber sniper rifles, which are an even more clear violation.
FELs do usually use rare earth magnets, but the total amount of material isn't very large compared to disk drives and other commercial uses.
Also, whether or not you can buy rare earth from China, you can buy all the rare earth magnets you want from China (for example, but not limited to, on ebay).
If you can't get the exact size and shape magnets you want, you can always demagnetize them, grind them up, and turn them back into raw materials. Then you have that which supposedly China doesn't want to sell you, or is limiting the sale of. And, of course, using the material you can make your own magnets of whatever size and shape you want.
"The Free Electron Laser, which uses magnets to generate its beam, will stay focused on getting up to a megawatt."
For a second, not sure why, I read that as a "free election laser". Now THAT would be quite a weapon against tyranny,
Adobe has basically already screwed THEMSELVES. Royally so. From their own decisions over the years. And google is basically just an advertising company. That's their revenue stream. They can't pull out of their other more interesting ventures such as Google Labs fast enough. It's pretty sad, actually.
Look, Adobe moving forward will not be further developing flash support for linux. That doesn't mean existing plugins magically stop working. Even if they take the downloads away, we've already got working plugins we have already downloaded. I know I'm not throwing mine away like a trained money. It doesn't need any fancy installer. It's basically just a huge but simple .so file you drop into the plugin directory.
It's clear that Adobe isn't going to be doing much more with flash on any platform. Simple maintenance and security (hah!) fixes on Windows and OS X, probably, for not much longer. I doubt they'll do anything to break compatibility, and even if they do, web developers are rapidly losing interest in flash anyway. None of them would bother to use any new gee-whiz crap junk. The day that anybody cared has passed. The fact that there is no iOS support for flash is the death knell for flash. And since linux is not a toy operating system, I am not worried much about newly uncovered security exploits. Worst case, I'll just sandbox my flash browsing under a dummy user. No exploit is going to be able to do anything outside that user account.
There's also gnash.
I use youtube-dl for most videos. It doesn't do streaming, but it doesn't need Flash!
Thanks for that! It looks like a valuable tool and a valuable learning instrument.
You can just as well install Firefox under a user account. That's what I did on RHEL6. The installed rpm is Redhat's stodgy old version, and that's what all other user accounts see, but my own user account runs Firefox 11.
I was up to 520 tabs the other day and noticed it was using 3.8GB and the whole computer was slow as HELL, with LONG pauses while typing or moving the mouse.
I have 64 bits, 16GB of RAM, and paging turned off; I was nowhere near running low on RAM.
It's pretty obvious water is necessary, too.
Butanol has a somewhat lower chemical energy/volume ratio than gasoline, but substantially better than ethanol or methanol. Sure that makes it "one of the highest density methods of storing [chemical] energy", for SOME definition of "one of", but it doesn't make it outstanding by any means.
The fact that you can synthesize a hydrocarbon from a source of carbon (CO2) and hydrogen (H2O) is no surprise to anyone of normal education level.
The choice of engine(s) in that design seems questionable to me. You're only talking 180 hp of fossil fueled engine. Even if the turbines were literally zero weight, you'd only be saving around the 200-300 kg range compared to a diesel, which as everyone has remarked and the designer admits, would have twice the fuel efficiency. So you have to have a fuel tank of twice the size, and twice the weight of fuel, for the same range extension. That reduces the weight saving. I'm going to guess the car weighs around 1500-2000 kg. And they are worried about maybe 10% of that weight?
Also, those turbines are going to be as expensive as hell, but who's counting, since the car is undoubtedly going to cost well into 6 figures.
If you hardly ever travel more than the car's idealized electric-only range of 110 km, it might be a fair tradeoff. Otherwise, a questionable choice. Interesting, though.
Spelling libertarian!
Moron. Murder by definition is not defensive. So no, that law has nothing whatsoever to do with murder. Well, it makes it a little less likely that you will be murdered in your own house because you can DEFEND YOURSELF.
At least discuss the topic in accurate terms. There might be a point somewhere in your absurdly overwrought language, but we'll never see it the way you're going on.
Because safety, or rather PRESUMED safety, or some asshole bureaucrat's idea of safety, is the ultimate point, right? It's not about improving life's experiences, it's about ensuring absolutely nobody ever comes to any harm whatsoever, no matter what it takes.
You know, libertarians do not intrude on others' lives, but self-important nazis do. You are the one who should get out of here.
Here's a clue. Safety is an illusion. No one is safe, and you can't force nature to make everyone safe. You could sandbag your front door and curl up in a fetal position in your bed, but your heart could still stop any time. A landing gear could fall off a plane and hit you. Lightning could strike you. Tsunamis. Burst aneurisms. Clots. Bear attacks. Bites by rabid animals. Tetanus from a tiny puncture. Brown recluse spider bites. Stepping on a thin layer hiding a sinkhole.
Yeah, right. You're just doing it because the big meanie started it. Well, guess what, genius. They're still subsidizing; you're an idiot if you think a little tariff is going to make any difference and restore manufacturing in the U.S. like the roaring twenties. So now, everybody in the normal world will have cheap solar while your sorry ass backward dump of a country won't have anybody who can afford to install solar.
What do you mean "we", white man? You're not up to speed, man. That privilege shit is in the past these days.
"OK, punk. I guess I'll be suing you for duress and threats, then."
Seriously, if someone asked me to sign away my rights in return for money, my response would be "You're putting me on, right? Or are you stupid? Or do you think I'm stupid? Whatever, the answer is no. HELL, NO! That's jobplace discrimination. And I'll be reporting this act of predatory coercion to the attorney general. What's that? You didn't mean it? So I'll be getting the same severance package as everybody else, right?"
Now, if you don't mind, the grown-ups are trying to have a discussion.
Actually, the grown ups are having a blast listening to the bawling squalling kids with their toy OS trying to figure out which hacked-together add-ons to use in order to plug deficiencies in their busted-ass operating system.
Just saying ...
Actually, while PC duffers were futzing with 16 bit Computer Innovations C, Lattice C, Microsoft C 1.0 in 1983, which was pretty much just a ripoff of Lattice C, then through the 80s with Microsoft C 2.0 through 6.0, with the first hesitant entry to 32 bits in 5.0 near the end of that period (even though there was no proper Microsoft 32 bit OS available yet at that time), REAL embedded programmers were working with 32 bit 68000, 68010, and 68020 using Green Hills C and compact deterministic real-time multi-tasking kernels such as VRTX.
Green Hills C was a significant improvement on the Portable C Compiler that came with SunOS and other BSD based unixes in those days.
When gcc finally matured, it was an ENORMOUS boon. The action nowadays is moving to Clang/LLVM though. With Clang, you don't have to compile a separate version for every cross-compile target. Every Clang executable is capable of producing code for any of the supported targets just by using the right run-time options. Of course, this doesn't address the point that you still need appropriate assemblers, linkers,libraries, startup code etc for each target. But they are trying to get a handle even on that with the Clang Universal Driver Project.
>> Find me a PC as small as a Mac Mini with comparable specs for $599.
> Any Sandy Bridge Mini ITX system.
Bull. Wrong. Absolutely wrong. You can't jam an off the shelf Mini ITX board with core i3/5/7 CPU and CPU cooler attached, plus power supply, plus hard drive, plus optical drive, into the current Mac Mini outline. Not even close. You couldn't even do it using an external brick power supply. The current Mac Mini form is much too thin, and the previous one was too small in all three dimensions. I actually tried to see how close I could come, and the smallest Mini ITX system I could make which could actually cool itself adequately enough not to burn up, without sounding like a jet engine, turned out to be comparatively gigantic.
A single company that I know of, Aopen, has made very nice minis the size of the ORIGINAL Mac Mini (which I think was a much more impressive form factor than the current one). But they couldn't do it using Mini ITX or anything else off the shelf. They had to engineer their own custom shrunken-laptop-like board inside and cooler, just like the real Mac Mini. I've had both, and they are both triumphs of practical engineering that no mini ITX piece of garbage can come close to. And the cost reflects it.
If you look at Aopen's Mini ITX offerings, you'll find that they have TWICE the enclosed volume, and crappy Atom CPUs. There is a REASON for that. These guys know how to make beautiful minis, but not using that kind of antiquated tech.
>> Know what else has a Core i7 processor? a Mac Mini.
> No it doesn't.
Yes it does. From Apple, right hand column: "2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 ... Configurable to 2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i7, only at the Apple Online Store." Of course ten seconds of checking would have told you that.
I had an English teacher who rather unfairly called sentences with more than a couple of clauses "sentence diarrhea", but that would be a stretch in this case. When you come down to it there is nothing grammatically wrong with the sentence. You might want a comma after "applications", but no other punctuation is warranted.
It makes me feel like quite erroneously I've done something for the environment.
FTFY.