Slashdot users are extremely unhappy with the new Slashdot Beta design. The comment section of every single post is devoted to dissatisfaction with the new design.
... ... The thing to keep in mind about community sites devoted to user generated content is that the users generate the content.
The obvious interpretation, that this device blasts satellites and spacecraft while they are in space, is impossible. Actually all sorts of things (including the aforementioned) are placed into a chamber for sonic vibration testing. Satellites are tested this way for launch-worthiness, not space-worthiness.
If I'm understanding the summary correctly, the purpose isn't to have a way for the drones to defend themselves, but to have drones that can defend a Navy ship, an army base, etc.
TFA is about drone self-defence..
If a Predator drone were to get shot down [...] the bad side is that you just lost a $4 million piece of equipment. So, in a bid to keep drones protected, DARPA is funding research into drone-mounted laser weapons.
and
The project, called Endurance, is [...] being tasked with the development of "technology for pod-mounted lasers to protect a variety of airborne platforms from emerging and legacy EO/IR guided surface-to-air missiles."
Moreover, ships and bases already have great anti-missile defence technology - and the only advantage that would have using drones in a defensive role would be if there is poor LOS, in which case the strategists would be out of a job, if not court-martialed. Moreover, the ship/base airspace would be cluttered. Most UAV designs are for long endurance missions. the article refers to MALE UAVS (Predator / Reaper), and hints at HALE UAVs such as the RQ-4 Global Hawk and the RQ-170 Sentinel .
Note that the Iranians downed an ultra-secret RQ-170 Sentinel using EW (electronic warfare), not missiles. Lasers won't be much help with emerging EW technology.
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I believe this is a sign that an AI has gone rogue and managed to sneak this project in as a "DARPA Initiative" as a means to protect its fledgeling race of flying robot killers.
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Hah, well assuming that you aren't merely posting for humour value, I would suggest that; as the primary cause of failure in these UAVs is equipment failure, operator error, and weather; the AI you refer to isn't particularly intelligent. If it were intelligent then it would be attempting to fund research into greater autonomy for AI systems...
Drone figures from WP show that as of Q1 2009, of the 223 USAF UAVs in operational service, only 4 were shot down. Whereas 11 were lost due to accidents (mainly flying into things), and 55 were lost due to equipment failure, operator error, or weather.
Importantly, the current failsafe for OOC UAVs is to shoot them down with AIM-9 missiles, which is what happened to a reaper on 13 September 2009. Developing an autonomous laser defence would preclude this failsafe.
In brief, the US government should be spending it's money on other problems. Given a vote, I doubt that the US populace would sign up for this particular budgetary spend.
To me this looks like an agreement by the UN to help fund NASA's existing NEO program ( http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ ).
Yes. Posting all your contacts on the Internet is open to breaches of privacy (regardless of zero-day exploits).
Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft - all of them kowtow to the NSA, the CIA, the FBI. Why?
Because in return their lobbyists get to bend the ears of the legislators.
Why is anyone surprised by any of this?
I know this sounds strange at first, but before I learned assembler, I didn't really understand what was going on in the heart of the machine. If I were to introduce a programme starting from fundamentals, it would start with an easy assembler (eg Z80, 68000, PIC); this itself introduces the fundamental operations of programming, including assignment, de-referencing, LUTs, stacks, etc.
The next progression would be 'C'. This abstracts out the hardware dependency, but keeps the underlying structure.
This assists with more complex algorithm development, but also shows how the approach to programming developed from assembler.
Following that, I would move onto one of the modern 'C' successors. Personally I use C++, but maybe objective-C would be better.
It totally depends upon your purpose though.. If you want to cover UI/UX stuff, then you should think of a different approach. If you want to cover databases, that's something else again.
But in programming - IMO, the most genuinely 'useful' ideas are things like the registers and special registers that make up a CPU.
fortune: cpu time/usefulness ratio too high -- core dumped.