Is The Power Supply Portable?
The article is a bit short on details but I wonder if the 3.3Kg weight includes the power supply? At the end of the article it says that the laser could be mounted on cars, boats and planes - for the power?
Phil.
The week surrounding America's "Huzzah, we kicked out the Brits, and will now spell color any way we like" Day, on July 4, is traditionally one of the slowest periods in the annual business tech news cycle. IT security, on the other hand, never rests. We've covered Google cracking down on non-HTTPS sites, Fortnite cheats …
just where would the Chinese go to get the cheap bootleg hardware??
They don't need to go anywhere. OK, so a lot of Chinese students go off to Western universities to learn STEM skills. Chinese universities also teach STEM courses domestically. But it's a simple numbers game. So there's a billion Chinese spread across the normal population bell curve for aptitude. If the most apt are funnelled through a decent education, China has a skill base more than capable of challenging the West for hardware.
And for the cheap bootleg hardware, China didn't need to go anywhere. Thanks to Western businesses desire to cut costs, engineering and manufacturing jobs were decimated in the West & stuff like iPhones sent to China for production. So instead of cheap soft toys and plastics, China's had the technology to produce sophisticated hardware gifted to it. So it's hardly suprising China's technology caught up, and is overtaking the West.
"And in related news, JeffyPoooh Instant Inventions Incorporated hereby places into the public domain the concept of employing surface arrays of innumerable precision retro-reflectors to send 98% of the high power laser beam 'right back at ya'."
Bullard Reflects: Author: Jameson, Malcolm: Published: 1941: Publisher: Astounding Science-Fiction:
South China Morning Post has articles about this and the view is that the power requirements do not match the alleged Li-batteries inside. In addition atmospheric attenuation will be a huge problem.
Another problem is blooming where heating of the atmosphere changes the refractive index which deflects the beam so that it no longer follows a straight line, a problem well known back in the days of SDI.
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"It's a cute surveillance technique, but one can't help wondering about its practicality. After all, if you have the kind of access to a target that allows this kind of thermal imaging then why not just use a plain old camera to watch typed passwords, install a keylogger, or just look over their shoulder."
s/minutes/seconds/ ... when I was a dumb kid, an Army quartermaster (if that was true) said they already had laser weapons but they couldn't use them because it was possible to slowly track across an enemy's e.g. arm and cut it off... and that was prohibitively inhumane. Gotta love the classics-- a small remotely launched bit of mass delivering kinetic energy to randomize some bit of flesh has never been a war crime per se.
Sorry, Mark 85, but you are wrong - although not entirely. As you can see here, the US has signed all four protocols, but only ratified two, the first and the last.
I don't exactly know what impact that has, but it must be significant.
As for China, it has signed and ratified the first three protocols, but not the last.
No. They did not.
On the other hand, should these things prove functional enough for civilians to actually want one[0], I rather suspect that if you are sane, not a convicted felon, and can prove you're bright enough to request the right forms & correctly dot the ts and cross the is, you'll be able to purchase one. Kinda like your common or garden M1928A1.
[0] I seriously doubt it, where's the fun in target shooting when you incinerate the target before you can see where you hit it? And not being able to make tin cans jump takes it out of the plinking market. And of course groceries, having a central nervous system, will move off before allowing themselves to be placed lovingly into the freezer. Besides, the power to weight ratio says no ... I can easily carry a couple hundred rounds of conventional ammo, lugging around a small power plant+fuel to keep one of these things ready to shoot would be problematic. Kinda like 'leccy cars, when you think about it.
the week surrounding America's "Huzzah, we kicked out the Brits, and will now spell color any way we like" Day, on July 4, is traditionally one of the slowest periods in the annual business tech news cycle.
Thanks for bringing a hearty laugh to a face who desperately needed it!
You may be surprised to discover how many Christians consider themselves Good Americans, yet will reflexively roll out the admonition by Paul to 'be subject to earthly authorities' every time you declare shenanigans on the government-- even though deciding your government is corrupt, and throwing it out, is the most American thing anyone can do. I'm not saying that would make someone a Good Christian, I'm merely saying it's kind of impossible to be both.
I should, if I considered myself a Good American, but I don't. So long as representative democracy is the game, and the majority keeps voting for this to stay the same -- bloody warped as it is-- then I have little to do for it but to finish whining. Like I said at work to a True Believer in all of this (and its current superuser), all I'm tryin' ta do is come up with something useful or find out something true and deliver it to the human race. Spoiler Alert: it won't be another Constitution.
The Democrats have wanted to remove representative democracy from the constitution for about 20 years now, and replace it with a modified socialism model. Yet, like all socialistic models, there is no real solution to how a country will pay if everyone received free ...everything.
American's don't celebrate kicking the Brits out of the country on July 4th. This is the day American's celebrate independence from a ridiculous monarchy. Since America had to give England two epic beat downs (don't forget about 1812) before they learned their lesson, another holiday was created for this azz-whooping. It's just not very PC these days to openly celebrate making another country your beotch; so this holiday isn't widely known.
Nothing. Former pseudo-employer used to say almost the same: 'what are you going to replace it with?' As if replacing it was my job, my business, my right, but it was just rhetorical BS anyway. It will be replaced, entirely without my help or any decision on my part. And that's cool. It would seem like a rather convenient way to dodge all responsibility for society's good condition but that's just what you'll say being a person who still subscribes to all of that. Of course there are still requirements I accept and others I even embrace... 'somehow reshaping the government' is not one of them. In the meantime, all that should be required of me (besides following the law) is just what I already said I intend to do: come up with something useful, or find out something true, and bring it out. Then the slice of objectively good things I already absorbed won't all be wasted on me.
"If the computer won't boot, how does one (un)patch it?"
Linux systems typically leave the previous kernel available as a boot option. That'll use* the un-borked microcode from before the update, that broke the latest kernel, boot that and update again.
* I'm not 100% sure of this - the microcode is part of initrd which is what the bootloader (Grub) uses to start the system - so I think this would work.
* I'm not 100% sure of this - the microcode is part of initrd which is what the bootloader (Grub) uses to start the system - so I think this would work.
I confirm that. The Linux kernel dynamically loads microcode to /sys/devices/system/cpu/microcode.
That's also how it's done in the README file shipping w/ microcode updates.
15mm calibre weapon. Er, is the laser beam 15mm? If not, it's not a 15mm calibre weapon. And it looks like it was cribbed off YouTube - lots of 'laser assault rifles' on there, all bursting black balloons (white/light coloured ones are too reflective it seems)!!!
Who can hold a weapon perfectly still for a few seconds whilst it's burning your enemy?
And to counter it? Wear mirrored Ray-bans :-)
... sunglasses are NOT laser proof here in the Real World. Not even expensive fashion mistakes like mirrored RayBans. This includes light from laser pointers and other toys. If you need to protect your eyes from laser light, you have to use filters at the correct wavelength.
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How does this finding differ to what seems on the surface to be exactly the same finding from 2011?
https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-08/heat-hacking-criminals-can-steal-your-atm-pin-code-heat-your-fingers-leave-behind
I'm sure someone can provide an example earlier than this, I didn't spend much time looking.
For solving the laser beam distance divergence and refractive index issue, you also used multiple surrounding beams of MICROWAVES (aka Masers) to heat the surrounding atmosphere outside of the laser beam trajectory,
This would theoretically form a "Virtual Waveguide" or "Fibre Optic Cable-in-Air" which will confine the laser portion within a super-heated cavity actually reflecting and not just refracting the laser beams especially those in the Green to UV wavelengths range! The photons SHOULD bounce around the maser-formed super-heated airwalls keeping the FULL POWER of the light beam (laser portion) along the entire distance without the "divergent coning" that happens in normal atmosphere.
You can also CONFINE acoustic waves within maser-heated air cavities to form a long-distance audio emissions system and actively target a SINGLE PERSON or LOCATION to make them think they're hearing ghost voices! Or you could simply use it as a long-distance person-specific communications devices without using a cell phone!
If the air is superheated enough by a maser or RF signal of a specific power-level you could also form virtual lenses and virtual mirrors by superheating whole areas of atmosphere cubic KM's in size to bounce other waveforms off of such as ground-penetrating radar beams, massively large acoustic waves, high energy lasers, etc.
The US-based HAARP (High Altitude Active Auroral Research Program) specifically did this type of research in the late 1980's and 1990's using radio frequency waves rather than 30 GHz to 60 GHz microwaves in order to superheat specified portions of the atmosphere across massive distances (many 100's of KM) for virtual lens and virtual mirror formation. The "Sky Voices" phenomena was one result where powerful sound waves were beamed across hundreds of KM via the refractive and reflective characteristics of superheated pockets of air and people thought they were songs or voices from heaven when it was a bunch of US military eggheads (boffins) in Alaska and Australia having their jollies bouncing super-amplified and distorted David Bowie or Pink Floyd music from air-lens to air-lens hitting people in the South of USA or North Eastern China!
OK, but doing a virtual waveguide, what keeps the maser from diverging if the maser is there to keep the laser from diverging? And if you're superheating air, obvs. air or something in the air has to absorb those wavelengths, would that be water vapor? And if you target a person, how do you keep the same energy-tube from engulfing your listener's head and starting to cook it? I would go and look it up but I probably already landed on more than enough watch-lists this week, for that heresy above.