TFA is just speculating a linear scale down to handheld and shark-mounted lasers as a joke. Pretty funny too.

The goal weapon is 150kW which will put out the .50s 17kJ in about .11 seconds.

Nothing mentions the diameter or frequency of the beam used, but as another person alluded exposed human parts would explosively vaporize, metal would melt, and clothing would ignite(sufficient to stop combatant) pretty quickly.

36.6C, 40kg body water raised to boiling 63.4 degrees.

40kg * 63.4C * 4.18kJ/(kg * C) / 150 kW = 70.7 seconds to boil a 40kg person.

But that isn't how it works, it's focused on say 20 cc of water. .02kg * 63.4C * 4.18kJ/(kg * C) / 150 kW = .035 seconds. So 20cc * 1700 = 34000cc BOOM!
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=.02kg+*+63.4C+*+4.18kJ%2F(kg+*+C)+%2F+150+kW

So (according to wolfram alpha http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=.035+s) between .4 to .7 of a "blink of an eye" 20cc of water turns to 34000cc of steam with what was a part of your body...and nobody said they turn the beam of here.

That probably over-simplifies how the energy would be converted and propagate through tissue, but who knows the frequency or diameter of the beam?

I agree it could be more powerful, but I thought the point of lasers was silence, precision, very little splash damage, and light speed travel to the target. Bullets are way slower than light, more adversely affected by wind, windows, etc. The use for this would probably be sniping guys with guns off a mosque with a drone instead of blowing up all their civilian shields and getting on the news.

Slightly more info and likely a big part of TFA's source:
http://www.ga.com/purchasing/pdf/HELLADS.pdf

heh, captcha is ablation ;)

Ditto shorter resolution. Also, if you had a skilled staff, you fix it yourself.

How many MS ATL apps are you running that are hackable?

How many vendors can update their product on your box without you running a separate update "daemon" in your HKLM/Software/Windows/Run key. Which shouldn't really even work anyway if your smart enough to leave your users out of the admin role. They aren't exactly benifiting from that WSUS server either.

Hell MS released a metric shit-ton of updates. How many MS ATL/Visual C++ apps are now hosed? You will never know, by design.

Nobody mentioned twitter?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/19/the-anatomy-of-the-twitter-attack/

LOTS of lead-in on that. Long story short: Password recovery email sent to abandoned and thus recycled and avaiable hotmail account. Register hotmail account, send recovery email. Use gmail account to do password resets all over the damn place.

Google docs & everything Google was done on the first step.

It's circular. It carries 220/208V. It can handle 30A loads. It twists to lock into place.

Admittedly, I haven't been exposed to many industrial grade outlets, but this one is just the bee's knees.

If reverse time travel were possible it would have already happened in the future. Either we do not matter much to the inventors or they're too worried about changing their own past and vanishing, causing a global war, or preventing the invention of the sonic screwdriver.

So what I am wondering is: If you change the past, does the current time continue to happen in an alternate universe, or would it just change all of the events and update the same reality. Alternate universes would require an entire universe worth of energy to fork right? That has me leaning toward single reality updates. Unless that universe already existed and ... oh I've gone crosseyed.

Anyone read "The Dreaming Void?" Substitute universe with known-universe and you just need a gigantic simulator that eats galaxies when it needs to fork. They should've built in logrotate on that simulator BTW.

The second we started broadcasting radio signals, we started talking to aliens. When we started having geostationary satellites we started beaming signals in a beacon that made it around a shadow of a satellite sweeping the earth's rotation and orbit. Which is not perfect coverage considering other bodies and the sun, still pretty good.

We can only hope they weren't listening.

Maybe the topic of the thread is how we can develop FTL travel to jam our previous signals before they reach the destination and instead explain that most of what is broadcast from our planet represents the worst of our culture.

Assuming one of Slashdot's readers is using a satellite internet service or possibly a wireless terrestrial connection, this discussion has made it there before any light-speed communications made after discovery.

So on behalf of our planet, please don't judge us by our average citizen, also don't visit for 500 or so years because we'll probably nuke you(which will tickle your ships..possibly recharging them via energy sink shields.) Then again if any of the show you've undoubtedly watched "X-Files" is accurate, please stop abducting stupid people and keep your genetic mutation virus to yourselves. Colonize some other planet congruous to your species that is uninhabited due to recent planetary cataclysm, please.

BTW: Enjoy the LOLcats.

I mean, this didn't hit the front page at all. I just tried to submit it because I figured, damn it's 9:42 Central time...surely this would be front page material. At least to attract scorn/flamebait. Maybe the AC original poster drug it into the mud.

I'm just so let down right now.

Stick on an external drive if needed. With Handbrake you can trascode those movie backups and stream them via Coherence to a UDMA/UPnP device (XBOX 360, PS3) etc. You have to do a custom setup with Handbrake to get the AC3 audio, basically select XBox360 as the target to get the defaults, change audio to AC3 direct stream copy or whatever, use AVI container, use Xvid(or FFMPEG not tested though) and viola.

Still requires some tweaking, I still get some weird artifacts with Xvid.

Use the easy_install Coherence method because the package in Ubuntu Intrepid sucked hard.

Also need 100Mbps ethernet to your XBOX360 to get acceptable AC3 audio. Not sure why but it streams at 30Mbps, your wiFi will probably fail at this. I troubleshot codecs forever until I read a post about bandwidth, copper made it awesome. Tip: if it works ok from a USB memory stick but sucks over wifi, you need a bigger pipe.

I know what the submitter intended.

So the second service pack to a product released in Nov 2007 constitutes "out of the box" for a 1.0 standard from Feb 2007, or the 1.1 from Feb 2008...or 1.2?

"Out of the box" just seems a poor choice. 2 years later after much feet dragging, an international debacle, trying to kill or commandeer it several times...etc. This seems more like a concession/defeat admission.

Better late than never? Now make it the default save format please...though that might be like signing your own death warrant. Too much to ask I suppose.

I feel bad for the guy that cleans the people soup this makes in the crater.

Ron White might say. This will take them all the way to the crash site.

Why the hell weren't they using ext2/3 or anything else? I'm guessing compatibility for the flash card readers for music loaded up by a windows PC or something?

Long AND short file names - This is the ~1 ~2 etc crap you get for file names from the 8.3 format. Probably not the exact same thing but wouldn't Unix symbolic links count? They're old as dirt.
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT5579517

Ditto
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT5758352

Flash memory. Remove the word flash and it looks a lot like a textbook from the 70s on file systems 101 would work. Hell it almost looks like this could've been avoided by using a block allocation bitmap instead of storing usage flags in block headers.
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6256642

I almost forgot: Type o' Dong. HAHAHA.

obligitory, low brow, sorry