Because everything is so far apart.

Seriously. Ignore for a moment any questions about energy or mass. The distance to the moon is 384,403,000 meters, give or take. At 1G you accelerate at 9.8 m/s. This means if you fly straight to the moon (or to where the moon will be when you arrive) under 1G of acceleration you're looking at about 2 1/2 hours to get there, at which point you plow into the moon at some god awful speed because there's no way to slow down in time. Assuming you only accelerate half the time then turn around and decelerate the remaining half so that you arrive at something approaching a sane velocity it would take about 3 1/2 hours.

That's an awful long time in terms of combat and the moon is incredibly close (if you are considering targets like Mars). Sure, it is incredibly fast in comparison to our current technology but a lifetime when people are shooting at you.

(N.B. The numbers provided are 'back of the envelope' calculations. The actual time would be quite a bit different because you could accelerate faster as you clear Earth's gravity well since a 1G acceleration would mean the astronauts would be subjected to 2G's on the ground. Assuming you were staying at a constant 2G's of force on the passengers your acceleration would increase the further you got from Earth until you reached your halfway point. However the math to deal with all of that is way, way to ugly for me to even consider right now).

Not sure if anyone else has posted this since a 'space combat' thread on Slashdot generates so much traffic it seems as if it should crash the servers (Dude, I heard you liked Slashdot....)

Anyway, it's kind of hard to talk about what 'space combat' will look like since 'space' is simply the theater for the conflict to occur in. Its like asking what 'land combat' looks like. When? 2012? 2025? 1942? 550 A.D.?

You probably need to start of with some assumptions concerning your technology. Lasers are a big one. I am not a laser physicist but as I understand it there's certain maximums of focal range that are related to the size of the lens. As I understand it in order to focus a laser at a spot about half a light second away you would need an absolutely gargantuan lens, one so big as to be impractical for combat. Now maybe I am wrong on this but this is an example as to why using lasers over such long distances might not be as easy as some people think.

Of course that assumes we don't find 'loopholes' around the problem such as somehow creating a synthetic lens through spatial warpage or some other technology. On the other hand if you've got some kind of technology that allows spatial warping then you quite possibly have much more effective weapons than photons.

My guess, in shorthand, is that combat in space will bear a certain resemblance to current combat. I suspect you will see guns for a long time (when jets were first becoming widely used by the military a lot of theorists thought that guns were going to go away because of the ranges and speeds jets would be engaging at. You'll notice they are still there because it turns out that at short ranges a missile often isn't the best option). I suspect you will have lots of your 'cheap' units (infantry, drones, spearmen, etc.) backed up with heavier units (tanks, fighter planes, knights on horseback, etc.) often employed along with small numbers of 'heavy hitters' (bombers, battleships, catapults, etc.).

The exact form these all take will be dependent upon the technology of the day.

Average rate of 9 cubic feet per year X 7 years = 63 cubic feet.

That's a cube of dirt 4' x 4' x 4'.

Hardly sounds like 'excavating a basement'.

I'm guessing that the 9 cubic feet number is wrong. Maybe 9 square feet (with an undisclosed height of about 8'-10') for an annual average of 72-90 cubic feet and a final excavation of a room about 8' x 8'?

There's a reason the article doesn't answer that question; because the answer is really, really dull.

At least that is what I'm assuming. The truth of the matter is that two weeks prior to the company's servers being hacked (March 30th) Sony Online Entertainment was forced to lay off a large amount of staff (I believe the number I read was 1/3) due to financial reasons. This layoff included programmers, designers, artists, administrative staff, and yes, people involved in the network security division.

I for one seriously doubt that there is really a causal relationship between the reduced network security staff and the breach. Two weeks just isn't long enough for things like that to fall apart. Just because people left the security they set up doesn't immediately shut down.

And for anyone who suspects that the employees who were let go caused the breach themselves, technically all those employees were still employed (there's a legal requirement that employees affected by large scale layoffs like this be given 60 days warning before being laid off, however because of reasons of security once people were given their warning they were sent home and paid for the next 60 days even though they didn't do anything). That would mean those employees would have been endangering six weeks of 'free' pay, their severance, and being paid for unused PTO.

While that doesn't absolutely rule out the possibility it does make it much less likely in my mind.

Yes, but in most of those cases the hacker could already reasonably assume that the password is in existence. As an example use the password "123456". On rockyou.com over 290,000 accounts used that password. That meant that out of 32 million accounts the odds that any given account used the password "123456" was about .9%. Even without feedback informing a hacker that "123456" is overused it is going to be one of the first passwords that they try on any system that will accept a 6 character password composed entirely of digits.

Compare this to a system in which the hacker receives confirmation that "123456" has reached its limit and he knows that 100 accounts are using it. In the first system he doesn't receive any feedback but he can very safely assume that well over 100 accounts are using that password. In the second system even though he receives the feedback the system is more secure against that particular form off attack because there are far fewer accounts using that particular password.

Actually that isn't a problem. If a hacker finds out that "passw@rd" has been used 10 times and reached the limits of use they still have to figure out which of the 1,000,000+ accounts use it. Randomly trying accounts means that they have less than a 1 in 100,000 chance of hitting one that accepts it.

This is as opposed to the hacker simply trying "123456" on a system of 1,000,000+ accounts without limits where there will probably be over 9,000 accounts using that particular password (based on the analysis of rockyou.com's passwords back in January).

The problem with this approach is that it fails if the password file itself becomes compromised. If that occurs the hacker can simply hash "passw@rd" and then look for any accounts using that hash. If strong passwords are enforced the hacker would have to launch a brute-force attack to find out that accounts have the hash of passwords such as "i1492,Cstob".

Considering that it is used in over 20 of their products (N.B.: I have no idea how many products BusyBox is used in. These 20 products are just the ones produced by a certain set of companies that are non-compliant. I would speculate that BusyBox is used in far more products where they are compliant) I think we can probably throw out the idea that it is crap.

Considering that it is very easy to comply with GPL as many other posters have pointed out we can throw out the idea that it is a legal mine field. The SFLC didn't even come after them demanding compensation for the previously shipped units. They simply asked them to come into compliance and it was only when they refused that the SFLC filed suit.

At a guess there are issues with a phone being required to stand up to a lot more abuse than a netbook. Just being in someone's pocket while they are walking subjects the phone to an awful lot of repetitive shocks. None of them may be very large but there's a lot of them to knock things loose. A good phone also has to be able to withstand slipping out of someone's hand on occasion and have a reasonable chance of surviving while most people would anticipate a dropped netbook breaking under similar situations. Then squish everything down to an even smaller size than the netbook.

So why is the Chinese iPhone so much cheaper? Again, at a guess there are two factors. The first is that all that work to improve survivability of the phone costs money. If a Chinese company reverse engineers a phone designed by someone else they can save themselves a lot of R&D expense. They can certainly save themselves the research on the form factor since they are copying the look of another phone. The second is that they can probably cut corners in the manufacturing. If an iPhone breaks under conditions most people would view as normal wear and tear the consumer is going to bring it back to AT&T who is going to then send it to Apple. Since the phone is being sent to Apple from AT&T they are more likely to accept it and replace it than if it came from an individual so it ends up costing Apple money to replace phones that shouldn't have broken. Plus they have to deal with bad PR. In the case of the Chinese phone if it breaks you can't take it to the carrier. You have to take it directly to them and they can bog you down with paperwork and/or just refuse to give you a new one.

Your honor, I would like to refer you to the case of RIAA vs Makeshitup in which it was clearly proven that the RIAA was in the right.

I don't want to have a video card, hard drive, or CPU that I can't easily upgrade and replace. Why would I want something that would require surgery to do that?

Oh. You're using a Creative Labs Brainblaster XL? Their new Brainblaster OMG has twice the bandwidth and three times the signal resolution.

Yeah, maybe you do get a better signal through hardwiring but lets see what happens in 5 years when I can buy the latest equipment and you are either stuck with the older tech or have to get your head sawn open

again.

Most aircraft mounted guns also weigh significantly more than 5 kg. I know, my first thought was why are they mentioning 9 mm when they are talking about aircraft mounted weaponry? Turns out that they are discussing scaled down versions in that section to the article.

Yes and no. The amount of energy isn't a terrible base line of comparison if you are doing "apples to apples". There are really 3 factors involved; the energy, how rapidly and efficiently the energy is transferred to the target and over how much area. Sunlight is a pretty good way of illustrating this. In full sunlight you can assume that 1 square foot (30cm x 30cm) receives about 100 watts of energy. Since 1 Joule is 1 watt per second that means that in about 7.5 seconds an area roughly the size of your chest would receive about as much energy as a 9mm bullet.

Obviously this has practically no effect on you. However take a magnifying glass a bit over 1 foot across (32 cm) and focus all of the energy into a spot a little under 1/3 of an inch (9 mm) across and all of a sudden you're causing some serious skin trauma. Likewise if the sun were suddenly 7.5 times brighter you would start to peel and blister in a hurry. Combine all the light of 7.5 seconds into a circle 1/3 of an inch across and apply it all in 1/100th of a second and you'll inflict some real damage.

Unfortunately the laser in their example delivers all its energy about 100 times slower than that. There's also a question of how big the target spot is and of course the fact that just the color of the target can cause a substantial amount of the energy to be reflected (substantial in this case being perhaps a few hundred Joules). So while the total amount of energy isn't a terrible way to compare them that does assume that the beam is focused relatively tightly (probably a safe assumption) and delivers the energy as a sudden single shot (which it clearly doesn't). As it is the comparison is less "apples to apples" and more "apples to orangutans".

From TFA:

If it scales down far enough, this would seem to put handheld HELL-guns within an order of magnitude of the striking power offered by conventional small-arms. A 9mm pistol bullet has about 750 joules muzzle energy: a 5kg portable HELL-ray weapon would put out this much energy in a blast less than a second long.

Since 9mm guns tend to be pistols they weigh a lot less than 5kg (11 lbs.). Most semi-automatic pistols are also capable of accurately firing 3-4 rounds per second and as has already been mentioned keeping a 750 joules laser on a target for an entire second would be close to impossible unless the target was completely incapable of movement, so that energy is going to be diffused across the target reducing it's effectiveness pretty severely.

I guess the last thing I feel obligated to point out is that a handheld HELL-gun that is within an order of magnitude of the striking power offered by conventional small arms would have about 75 joules of muzzle energy and would be about as dangerous as a BB gun (You could put your eye out with it). An order of magnitude is a factor of 10.