These probably are not meant to kill anything but suicide attack boats.

CIWS and even 5-in guns with optimized shells are not good at killing agile craft at ranges beyond point-blank. When a small target with judiciously applied armor jinks, it is almost unkillable until the time of flight comes under 3 seconds (about 1-2 km), as any "motivated" use of the rudder causes a wild displacement in deflection that makes perfect aim mean a perfect miss on every shot. The "best" fire control in such a condition is a pattern of fire about the projected aim point, and this actuarial risk is moderate to a determined enemy who has numbers on his side: the guy you fire at goes defensive and becomes all but invulnerable while his friend bore in with rudders centered and throttles opened wide.

These weapons, if they can keep their power up with enough regularity, will bleed a swarm attack at the intermediate range, leaving the ballistic weapons for the few that might have bobbed past.

...when it's traditional to use pH?

I'd like to see a Date that can be missing some fields, such as "early january", or "2013" and have the objects be Comparable and yet not forget that their actual value is not exact. For instance, "early" in a month might mean the 5th in terms of comparison, but its toString() would say "early January", and a year without further specification might compare as June 30th.

These sorts of things are helpful when you're recording researched data and don't want the persnickety exactness of the representation to hide the fact that you don't know all the fields.

What does this have to do with sea urchins?

All security is by obscurity. As in "you don't know my password."

The issue appears to be using a password that is one of a top N passwords.

The XKCD comic is laughably inaccurate, .e.g, in that it says that the presence or absence of capitals is one bit of entropy. Of course it is -- if you regard the first character ONLY as the candidate for capitalization.

tone

People who see these slippery slopes everywhere should take up skiing

Why can't Apple stop using these hokey names for their software versions after release? There is no means of knowing what version it is, and it requires out-of-band knowledge of the most useless type. "About this Mac" quotes the grown-up version number. The names are 100% pure loss

Freedom of Speech doesn't necessarily imply freedom of speech AND TIME AND PLACE.

A funeral is one of those things we all will have, and at which none of us will be free to speak back against those who might speak against us. The air should be tuned, on those occasions, to the interests of the deceased and the sensitivities of those who love them. If you are not on the speaker list, you're in the audience, mate. You have the rest of the world and the rest of time to express your caustic views. That's a lot of space and time. It's an uncommon mind that can fill both. Really.

If you cannot come up with something nice to say, and find yourself utterly unable to shut your maw, I can spot you one positive thought: be thankful this isn't YOUR funeral, and think what you might wish that moment to be like.

"'Context aware' is the key to revolutionizing the TV-watching experience: you can say the name of a TV show, the name of a channel, the description of a show, or the description of a kind of video you'd like to find on YouTube, and the TV will tell you it's not available in your country or requires upgrading to a package of subscription."

Fixed it.

It flue in

I have found in my own limited use of cryptography code that I was entirely unsure if I were using it correctly or as intended, owing to a completely new lingo used for everything, which was nowhere bound to a comprehensive explanation of what it meant, why it was needed, and what practices should be avoided.

I came off thinking the big advance would be to avoid sending out under-documented code in the first place. The average user is not a cryptologist, but a vanilla coder-of-things, and to avoid heartache at the user level, these coders must find the libraries straightforward.

Weren't very first CIWS systems focused primarily on skimmers? Pop-up attack modes appeared in later missiles primarily as a means to confound the core strength of these. The RN wanted them for ships heading to the Falklands where sea skimming missiles were the threat for which they had the thinnest countermeasures.

The latest CIWS shows a 25 degree depression angle limit on Wikipedia (earlier ones, 20). I'm not sure how many ships installations permit that, but I'd think the sponson mounting would permit it.

The carrier is, by far, the most useful ship in the fleet in the wars we fight. Its theoretical weaknesses only become actual in the wars we don't fight.

Their greatest downsides are their expense and operating costs.

The restriction against use of primary sources is silly, and one of the main reasons I have my own wiki (for naval history).

I had to beg and plead to correct the page on USS Constitution which asserted that the ship's wheel was still one removed from HMS Java in 1812 because some idiot wrote that in a book. You can look at the wheel and tell that it is plainly under 30 years old. You can email the very person at Navy History and Heritage Command who is in charge of maintaining the vessel who can tell you when that wheel was installed, and when the one it replaced was installed, and... they want someone to write a book. And what exactly would that do except create "a lack of consensus"?

Wikipedia is a great thing, but when it becomes a means of preserving and disseminating falsehood, a great opportunity is grossly diminished.