No, Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem means it actually is impossible.

Or, to put it another way, imagine two trees in a space of all possible 'statements' (programs) in any useful language. One covers all provably false/wrong statements, the other covers all provably true/correct statements. Not only will there be spaces not covered by either tree, there will be spaces covered by both trees.

These days even compiled and assembled languages actually run within a run-time environment (and actually is run on a virtual machine that is interpreted in firmware by the CPU and its friends), making the distinction even less clear or useful. It's been a long while but IIRC, just running "Hello World" in C brings in a dozen or two libraries and the running program will likely be 100K+. And I once worked on a FORTRAN system where the same code could be run using an 'Incremental Interactive Compiler' - effectively an interpreter, useful for composing and debugging, or a classic compiler that generated a monolithic runtime program. The latter was much faster, of course.

Compare the exploding substation to old videos of an ammunition ship (or any old battleship) blowing up because one of the magazines gets penetrated and explodes. The comparison is sparkler vs. Oklahoma City. Actually OK City was tiny by comparison - a ship's magazine might well be holding 100 times as much explosive as the biggest truck bomb every set off. Magazine explosions have launched entire ships into the air, to come down in multiple pieces.

Lasers are (eventually) MUCH cheaper than guns. And MUCH MUCH safer for the crew. And MUCH more dangerous (potentially) to the enemy. The most dangerous threat to a ship is penetration of the ammunition magazine, causing a few hundred or thousand tons of explosive (cordite, whatever) to go "Boom!" (cue picture of ship splitting in two and sinking in seconds). And delivery of all that explosive material, and fuel, is difficult, dangerous and very, very expensive. The delivery cost, IIRC, is five or ten times the cost of the actual ammunition. Fuel costs something like $50/gallon to delivery to ships at sea.

Lasers and rail guns have the potential to make ships much more lethal, much safer to be on (and requiring fewer crew), much cheaper to operate, and able to stay in the battle much longer. A nuclear ship with laser weapons could shoot at some rate essentially constantly, for months if necessary. Someone else noted that a CIWS (Phalanx) carries 2550 rounds, enough for a 15 second burst. Then it takes vive minutes to reload. Five minutes is a LONG time in battle.

I believe that these lasers are focused, so there is some point where the beam reaches minimum width. After that the beam spreads and at some distance comparable to the distance from the weapon to the target, it's going to degrade to less and less destructive potential.

The first airborne drone to be shot out of the sky with a (chemical) laser was back in 1979 or 1980 - there was a picture in Aviation Week. Interestingly, this was several years before the DoD admitted even doing research in the area.

There is lots of information on the web about all aspects of military lasers, what they work on, pictures and videos of tests, evaluation of every issue mentioned in every comment here. I've been following this topic casually for some time, and the data is out there. Google is your friend. But I know, nobody on /. reads TFA much less research the topic - not picking on you, this is just a general statement of fact. :)

I will note that the major 'win' for laser systems and to a lesser extent rail guns is logistics. A military organization is basically like UPS - it's all about getting parts, ammunition, fuel, and people delivered where it's needed. Ammunition in particular is a huge PITA - dangerous in transit, bulky, and dangerous when stored on a ship. The classic 'torpedo hit' in the movies is when the torpedo penetrates one of the magazines on a ship, which then explodes en masse, and the ship splits in two - or in dozens! The cost of delivering the ammunition to the ship exceeds the cost of the actual ammunition, and delivery of fuel is several times as expensive as the fuel.

For perspective, the guns on the old battleships like USS Missouri took several 100 lb. bags of cordite to fire off one shell. That's a lot of explosive. Eliminating that explosive makes more room for actual delivered shells, and eliminates a ship's greatest existential threat - an exploding magazine.

Using rail guns the only explosives would be whatever the shell being shot contains (which, if it is hypersonic, may be none - kinetic impact may be enough). Using lasers, a nuclear ship could essentially shoot continuously (at some rate) indefinitely - they would 'never' run out of ammo. So yes, this is still experimental. They are still working on increasing operational (as opposed to research) power output to the 100 KW range where things really get 'interesting'. But General Atomic already has a 150 KW laser running in research.

Well put! :D

As a less-experienced but reasonably well read (for whatever that is worth) sailor, I would say that is possibly the wisest thing I've read on this thread. If you ever need crew, give me a PM. I'm working on repairs to the hull of my 40 foot motorsailer, and have done a small amount of offshore crewing.

From what I've read, it's true that for bigger boats especially, if you're going to be caught in a hurricane, it's safer being out at sea than close to all those hard things that the shore involves. But that does assume the boat is seaworthy. In this case that was (as we now know) a fatal assumption - or more likely, vain hope. In this case, I think the best thing to do would have been to dock or anchor the boat as well as can be done and remove all the crew to a hotel, and hope rather vainly that the boat would survive. But they probably didn't have the necessary lines to tie it down, nor a good 'hurricane hole' to go to. At least the crew would not have been in jeopardy. Sometimes it's necessary to put life and limb ahead of assets.

Different strokes :) IIRC Kickstarter pretty much demands at least one video. I'm told that good videos make a huge difference in the success of a campaign. Most folks just like the eye candy, and many people basically don't want to read the prose - they make their pledge decision based on the video. Or, if the video piques their interest, then they'll start reading (and look at the first couple of paragraphs, then the rewards. So you're probably in the minority. It would be interesting to do an eye tracking study of different campaigns, then survey the users to get their responses to the campaigns, and compare the data.

I recall when EBay first moved to Sun/Oracle several years ago, shortly thereafter they were down for a day or two. As I recall the loss of income was several $million. That's the kind of number that makes the CIO not sleep at night, and lose hair.

During our work on Our Future in Space video project we learned (I don't know how) that the entire Kickstarter team is, like 6 or 10 people, all of whom are running around with their hair on fire trying to keep everything running. They don't have a lot of time for improvements. Although with the money they're raking in (5% off the top), I would think they should be able to hire a couple more developers.

The 'mom' was never pregnant. It just divided. Unfortunately the other half got all the DNA!

Actually bubbles have been identified back 2000-3000 years. There are some interesting things about tech bubbles (as opposed to government manipulation, federal reserve, inflation and other non-tech bubbles). Typically at the peak of a tech bubble there are many, perhaps hundreds or thousands of companies in the market (viz. PCs, dotcom, the auto industry, plastics fabrication, maybe 3D printing? - and arguably the rise of the quants and high speed trading are both technological advances associated with bubbles ). When the bubble breaks 70% to 90% of those companies fail, get bought, disappear one way or another leaving what we'll call 'the most robust'. The cool part is that for essentially every tech bubble that has been studied, 10 years after the bust the market is at least four times as large as at the peak of the bubble. For a recent example, look at the dotcom bubble of 2000, and compare the Internet then to the Internet now. The present Internet as a market is probably an order of magnitude larger than it was then.

So the lesson is, bubbles happen. Tech bubbles are not overall a bad thing, although they can be painful as the disruption caused by the new technology spreads through the system. It's part of life. And in the long run it generally works out for the better as we enjoy the benefits of the technology.

The internet is an existence proof of the need for editors! :D

In fairness it's also a marketing/presentation layer. And nontrivially, their structure encourages some discipline about actually putting together something that might work. So just going through their hoops you are more likely to have a project that might get funded, and even might get done. But their backend (from what I've heard) is pretty painful to work with.