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Submission + - US Navy authorizes use of laser in combat (usni.org)

Submitted by mi
mi writes: The U.S. Navy is has declared an experimental laser weapon on its Afloat Forward Staging Base (AFSB) in the Persian Gulf an operational asset and U.S. Central Command has given permission for the commander of the ship to defend itself with the weapon.

The 30 kilowatt Laser Weapon System (LaWS) was installed aboard USS Ponce this summer as part of a $40 million research and development effort from ONR and Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) to test the viability of directed energy weapons in an operational environment.

No word yet on a smaller, shark-mounted version.

Comment Re:Shetland and Orkney (Score 1) 192

by barlevg (#47938459) Attached to: On Independence for Scotland:
Yes, this is correct, and my bad for perpetuating the myth. I read once that Shetland was closer to Oslo than Edinburgh, but that's also blatantly false. The more relevant Norway/Scotland fact is simply that Shetland used to belong to Norway, so their historical ties to Scotland are weaker.

Comment Shetland and Orkney (Score 5, Interesting) 192

by barlevg (#47936539) Attached to: On Independence for Scotland:
The interesting question to me regarding Scottish independence is what will happen to Orkney and Shetland (the latter of which is closer to Norway than Scotland). Shetlanders often don't consider themselves Scots, and so the thinking is that they might seek their own independence if Scotland breaks away from the UK. And that would likely have huge ramifications for Scotland's oil trade, since a lot of the resources, as I understand it, are in the North Sea.

Submission + - 700k New Zealand Internet Users Suffer Outage From Fake Celebrity Nudes Malware (techgeek.com.au)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: techgeek reports, "Spark New Zealand – the country’s largest internet service provider – suffered a massive outage lasting nearly thirty hours from last Friday. The outage saw its nearly 700,000 customer base having slow or no internet connectivity on their mobile phones or computers – all because some users on their network wanted to see nude pics of celebrities. According to local media, some users clicked on a link that claimed to contain images from the recent dump of nude photos of several high profile female celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence and Ariana Grande. However, the link lead them to a page telling them they had to download a piece of software to view them – which was malware. ... Spark told the New Zealand Herald that it was a denial of service attack linked to some of its customers downloading malware was the reason why its network went down, and has taken steps to remedy the problem." — NBC News reports both phishing and malware attacks associated with the stolen photographs.

Comment Was expecting an article on upscaling filters (Score 1) 167

I was really excited to see that new builds of ffmpeg (which is FOSS) implement the hqx family of filters, but I've also read that these filters are pretty outdated at this point. So I was hoping that this article would be a comparison of upscaling algorithms, both free and proprietary. But alas...

Comment Re:Another sign NASA is circling the drain ... (Score 2) 160

by barlevg (#47679971) Attached to: The Flight of Gifted Engineers From NASA
Wow is this uneducated. I can't speak to the federal workforce as a whole, but for a variety of technical fields, like the one described in this article, as well as my own (data science), the federal government pays "competitively" but salaries in the private sector tend to be quite a bit higher. As for the hours and the benefits, that's largely a function of where you work, but I will point out that federal pensions for new hires got slashed as part of a recent round of budget negotiations.

Comment Re:"assemble" or "reassmeble" (Score 1) 391

by barlevg (#47586945) Attached to: How long ago did you last assemble a computer?
What if your mobo shorts out and that's all you need replaced? That, to me, is a lot less of a change in computer than a CPU upgrade or a new hard drive: replace one of those, and your computer will run noticeably differently, but if someone were to come into your house and swap out the motherboard of your computer in the middle of the night, you might not even notice a difference assuming the BIOS was the same.

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