You can print sintered metal now. They're printing in plastic because it's cheap. Cheap sintered metal printers aren't far behind.

If you figure out who at your office does the perks purchasing, a birthday card and a phone call can go a long ways towards upgrading you from folgers to starbucks coffee grinds and generic to fanta brand orange soda, etc.

This is basically a laptop without the expensive bits - i.e. the screen and battery. I would be surprised if the bill of materials exceeds $500 this time around. Technology has come a long ways in 7 years.

That's not the point, the point is that if Google+ (or whatever they're naming their "standard") isn't open, then the cottage industry of third party IM clients (some of them are actually pretty decent) would roll over and die.

describing Geocities as "a blogging network" is like referring to medieval town criers as social media newsfeeds.

Geocities was a free web host that provided some primitive site creation tools and injected a bunch of ads. did some people use them to create sites with regular updates? sure. but there was a heck of a lot more "chewbacca ate my balls"and "JEFFROS AWESOME PAGE OF COOL LINKS!!!! (UNDER CONSTRUCTION)" than there was anything else. i don't even think the term "blog" had been minted by the time geocities peaked.

I use my phone's camera to record unmemorable but unusual things that happen throughout the day. Helps jog my memory.

This isn't realistic in large suburbs which are criss-crossed with 6 lane (3 lane each way) "surface roads" with 40-45mph speed limits, especially at rush hour. This is about 90% of most people's commute in the DFW (Dallas) area & suburbs (google "dfw metroplex").
 
For whatever reason, the yellow lights at these 45mph intersections by my mom's house in Plano (DFW) is shorter than the 30mph yellow light near my house 15 miles away in Dallas. The one big difference is that the 30mph intersection has no red light camera and is a low traffic intersection.
 
If anything, high traffic intersections should have 10-12 second yellow lights, not less than 5 seconds...

Heh. I knew if I twisted the Yanks' tails I'd get outraged fanboy "'MERICA!" responses.

All y'all are nothing if not predictable.

Yup. We're a long way away from the ballistically-matched ranging gun.

With engagement distances up to 4000m, and ~2500m being a fairly routine shot, it's hard to imagine a ranging gun with that much reach and that provided enough visible splash to let you know you're on.

All the M1s I've seen and worked with had single-axis sight head mirrors. It adjusted for elevation, but lead compensation moves the sight picture around. If the target - or the tank - changes direction suddenly, the Abrams gunner has to "dump lead" (reset the system), retrack, and re-lase.

Whereas the Leo gunner just keeps tracking with the same sight picture and waits an extra heartbeat for the gun to realign.

Maybe the very latest Abrams finally has a 2-axis mirror and has made it into the 1980s.

Lack of an autoloader isn't really a knock on a tank. Autoloaders tend to be finnicky, and struggle to keep up with the reload speed of a well-motivated 19 year old.

But on top of that, it is really very useful to have that 4th crewman. Tanks need a lot of work to keep operational and the crew commander is frequently off getting orders - having that extra body is a real force enabler.

Crew a Leo, and crew a Abrams, and tell me what you think.

I know what I learned by doing so - and the Leo FCS is FAR superior.

The FCS on a tank works mostly the same way.

The sight is mounted on a mirror that can pivot in two axis on good tanks, an one axis on an Abrams. The ballistic computer knows what ammunition is in the breach (a user input - by the loader on good tanks, by the gunner on an Abrams) and so knows the ballistic profile of the round being fired. A slew of other sensors measure crosswinds, barrel droop, and the like. The laser rangefinder provides range, and an angle encoder in the turret slip ring provides rate of turret rotation, which provides a measure of target relative motion.

Gunner tracks target and then lases to get range. The FCS then jumps the gun barrel in both elevation and rotation while the sight mirror jumps back in the other direction(s) to keep the sight picture unchanged. The gunner fires, and the round impacts where the ballistic solution says it should.

From the gunner's perspective, you lay on target, track for a second, then fire the laser and fire the gun in close succession ("lase and blaze") and the round "magically" flies out and hits the target - no matter if you are moving, the target is moving, or both. You can be driving along at 60 km/h and hit a target moving 60 km/h 2500m away on the first shot.

DG

AMD is still hear and

Not for long, if you're representative of the quality astroturfer that they can afford these days...