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US Navy Authorizes Use of Laser In Combat 225

mi writes The U.S. Navy 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 In what way is this a "vulnerabilty"? (Score 1) 121

Given that the machines have to have the acoustic networking software installed on them (requiring already having root access), this is at worst a covert communications channel that could be used to bypass network security controls in order to exfiltrate information from an otherwise secure network. It has no impact on whether machines can be hacked to begin with.

Comment Exploiting ambiguity to latch onto hype (Score 2) 186

I don't know why people keep submitting this garbage from Espresso Logic, who is just taking advantage of the fact the the term "reactive" has been overloaded to mean different things to exploit the hype surrounding the Reactive Manifesto and related technologies (e.g., Akka, Rx, Node.js, etc.) to push their own, completely unrelated product, which is based on the more traditional (i.e., the one you find in Wikipedia) definition of "Reactive Programming".

"Reactive programming", as defined by the Reactive Manifesto (which is what all the hype is about), is about designing applications that operate in an entirely asynchronous and non-blocking manner, so as to maximize CPU utilization and fully exploit parallelism, and ensure that the system is always responsive to new events (user input, incoming data streams, errors, changes in load, etc.) rather than having resources tied up waiting for external processes (e.g., blocking on I/O). It has nothing to do with "reactive databases".

Comment Re:Not a tank (Score 1) 232

Many early tanks (up through WW2) had anti-tank capabilities (indeed, the first tanks had no reason to have anti-tank capabilities - there were no other tanks to fight against). The main distinguishing features of a tank are its armor (which need not necessarily be very heavy - just enough to deflect small arms fire), its tracks, and the fact that it has some sort of weapon mounted on a turret.

The Panzer I was classified as a light tank but was armed only with MG13 machine guns. The British Vickers Light Tank Mk VI likewise only had .50cal and .303cal machine guns.

Comment Re:Don't let them patent it! (Score 1) 80

Rhino runs an interpreter that first compiles JavaScript into its own pseudo-bytecode, and then interprets the pseudo-bytecode. I believe what Oracle is proposing is to compile JavaScript directly into Java bytecode, using the new features of the JVM to handle the dynamic aspects that weren't possible with previous versions of the JVM.

Comment Re:What a tool (Score 1) 505

You should just put a big banner across the top of the screen that reads: "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU." The government in 1984 gave full disclosure as well.

That said, they are your children, and by extension it's probably your computer as well (or at the very least, your Internet connection), so you're well within your rights to monitor how it is used. It isn't really even necessary to actually do any monitoring. As long as they believe they're being monitored, the effect should be the same.

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It is masked but always present. I don't know who built to it. It came before the first kernel.

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