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Comment Re:Time for laser guns (Score 3, Insightful) 156

Pin-pointing a laser onto a moving target is getting progressively more difficult the faster the target is. Targeting optics need to be progressively faster and more precise to hit the object for the time needed to have the intended effect. And all the effect the laser it has is proportional to the energy it deposits per square centimeter onto the target. With more air passing by the object, even more energy is dissipated and with the faster speed, the total flight time in range of the laser is progressively shorter.

That's what makes hypersonic weapons so dangerous. They're too fast for defensive missiles to counter. There's less time for detection and identification overall, less time for a friend-or-foe decision, less time to align the laser spot on the target, the laser will be less accurate on the target, depositing less energy per square centimeter and second, the while the projectile dissipates more energy per second to the air around it and the laser system will have far less time anyway to destroy the incoming projectile before it impacts the thing it was supposed to defend.

Look at the few leaked videos of hypersonic missile impacts. These missiles are so fast that there's barely a 1 or 2 seconds between the missile appearing and impacting. Current lasers have AT BEST a 10km engagement distance and that doesn't include the plasma shield that air forms around the HGV due to air friction at that speeds. At Mach 12 and ideal conditions, the laser will have less than 2 seconds time to deliver all its energy, through all atmospheric distortions, follow the HGV's potentially unpredicable flight path without instantly and permanently blinding all humans near and around the defended area.

Atmospheric dust and smoke will quickly render that even more impossible than it already is. So even if the first few defense shots MIGHT be effective, every subsequent shot will become harder and harder because there will be more and more dust and smoke in the air around the laser. If lasers become too effective in the future, then you will see the attackers firing whatever they can find to increase smoke and dust in the atmosphere around the laser or reengineer their HGVs to release insane amounts of smoke when targeted or destroyed so you can at best destroy the first few of them until there's far too much smoke around to do anything with lasers against the next wave. Or they wait with their attack until there's fog or dense clouds over the target, forcing the defense to use MASER or similar things that could penetrate clouds more easily, but who knows what disadvantages that brings. And the Chinese leveraging their most prominent strengths, you can be absolutely sure their HGVs will be mass-produced in ridiculous numbers and through economies of scale become ridiculously cheap as well. They will then simply spam them over the target so that no amount of laser technology will be able to counter them, because you can't reasonably concentrate the amount of energy needed to defend against all of them. Even if you had 100 or 10000 lasers of the required intensity (1MW or more), there simply won't be enough Watts / Joules around to feed them all.

There is very little defense against mass-produced, reasonably cheap gliders at speeds above Mach 4. The attackers can distribute production and stockpiles of gliders over their entire country and produce and stockpile for years, and mass them on any single target. The Joules needed to produce them can easily be transported to the factories, because there's enough time to do so. The defenders would have to place enough lasers near all potential targets to counter a massed attack on any of them. The Joules needed to fire the defense lasers would need to be transported immediately from everywhere to any one target area or stored everywhere in a way that's currently totally unfathomable to us. And even if we managed to do that, HGV production would profit from these advancements as well, bringing more and cheaper HGVs down on the target, immediately nullifying that advance right away.

In short: defending against cheap(er) mass-produced HGV gliders is literally, physically, theoretically and even ontologically impossible.

If you want to read further, look up "Hobbesian trap", "Fermi paradoxon" and "Dark forest hypothesis".

Comment Re:Seems pointless (Score 1) 52

The first thing that ages in all laptops is the thermal interface material between heatsink(s) and processor(s). Once the TIM begins to dry / age / pump out / degrade, it sets off a positive feedback loop where the chip gets hotter with TIM aging, which in turn gets the chip hotter still and aging the TIM even faster and so on. A little lint and dust in the heatsink will kickstart this even higher.

LCDs didn't have a CCFL backlight prone to aging in a while, and they also mostly avoided OLED so far, so they don't have the other age-prone display technology.

If the laptop is of any value whatsoever, it is built in a way that allows the heatsink / fan to be replaced by a service tech in one hour or less. Most gaming laptops are built that way and many business line models, too. Business laptops have enough spare parts available for cheap, so they win in that regard.

The published MTBF for a part are rarely relevant for laptops and you shouldn't rely on that. Since laptops are carried and used in the full variety of human behavior through the full variety of human environments, their wear levels are varying wildly. For a server HDD, you can assume server room environments with controlled temperature and vibration. For laptops? No way. Some were used stationary in air-conditioned offices, never moved and not even typed directly on them and some were trotted around every day on construction sites in the desert.

Comment Re:Seems pointless (Score 1) 52

Temperature matters a lot for components and laptops usually max out their component temperature limits quite a bit.

If I had two identical laptops with a similar age and wear, I would immediately choose the one that has seen more hours at higher temperatures, although it would be difficult to formulate this in such a way that it can be used mathematically or algorithmically. Laptop A has operated 1 hour at or above the allowable CPU temp of 100 degrees Celsius and 9799 hours at idle with barely higher CPU temps than ambient - vs. laptop B that has never been above allowable CPU temp, but logged 9800 hours above 70 degrees Celsius. Who knows which one is the better deal?

But on a qualitative level, "operating hours x temperature ~ wear" and thus the usage history of the device is relevant for its used value.

Comment Re:How does a company even function (Score 1) 82

That person is asking people to hide any hint of sexual emotion for 8 hours a day every day forever. And then judge them for not having sex.

Only a feminist woman could argue like that: sex is their unit of value and only they would be so moronic to ask someone to not be sexual and then insult them for not having sex.

Comment Re:How does a company even function (Score 1) 82

"Do your job" means: no TikToks on the job. No forced DEILGBTQIAAAP+ seminars and no person hired or kept for anything but their performance and importance for the work focus.

"Don't make comments to people about anything that makes them human. Do not act like a human to other humans in the workplace": not going to happen. F you and your bullshit forever. We are all humans. We are not machines and we will never be turned into cogs in the machine. We are demanding everyone to act professionally and FOCUS on work issues, but demanding humans to shed ALL their human-related substance for 8 hours every workday is insane. We are not robots. We will never be robots. And you demand us to be. You want us to be faceless, emotionless, inhumane zombies, robots, golems. When everything human is "sexual harassment", you need to work with machines. There are plenty of jobs available with machines and robots. Go there. If you work with healthy young men and women, you will encounter emotions and sexuality. Deal with it. It's what we are. We can never not be humans and we will never be free of reproductive and tribal aspects. It is baked in our DNA and the only reason we have new humans. Birth rates are collapsing everywhere because of demands like yours. Either this idea ends or the civilization that tries to uphold it. Your choice. I say we end the idea first so we can continue being a civilization.

"Incel" means your only unit of value is intercourse. That shows you are a feminist woman arguing against your strawman caricature of men. Also, used in this context, immediately before asking people to NOT do, think, talk, act in any hint of a sexual manner is idiotic. You are judging people for having sex or not and THEN demand they don't have any sexual emotion - how utterly moronic.

Comment Re:How does a company even function (Score 1, Troll) 82

Every company has staff that can easily be let go in an engineering firm without harming productivity:

- GenZ Boss and a Mini
- Itty Bitties and a Bob
- 5'3 and an Attitude
- Try not to cringe: impossible
- all others who TikTok on the job, no matter if they're posting or just watching
- "I'm a People Person" persons
- DEI officers and their commissars
- DEI hires

In short: anyone who is proudly wasting company time and resources and / or is hired / kept because of reasons unrelated to the core function of the business, especially political reasons, signaling, fear of discrimination lawsuits etc.

Anyone who's more proud of the name of the company they work for than their actual work.

Anyone who speaks like a career politician.

Anyone who demands something from others they don't do themselves.

Anyone who would NOT come in to help the company on a Sunday for a true, actual, once in a decade major emergency at their workplace, unless they are sick, have small children or family members that truly require care, have important family obligations (that means births, weddings, funerals, 70th birthdays of their parents and up, not a BBQ at aunties) or are out of town.

Anyone involved in not avoiding that once in a decade emergency.

Comment Re:What is the consumer trying to tell you? (Score 1) 192

Occupy Wall St. happened.

The tribe panicked and decided that they really really really need to divide and conquer society before their banks get overrun by protesters. That's when they started trooning and diversifying everyone out, as people who are preoccupied with their genitals can't nationalize the banks.

Comment Re:If Broadway is flourishing, (Score 1) 192

Diversity is the keyword.

Few people want to be in the a movie theater with the loudest people of the planet. And all our cities have them by the boatload.

Few people like to see movies that are bursting at the seams with diversity and wokism. All current big media production have nothing else.

Few people want to pay a trillion dollars for popcorn and softdrinks. All our cinemas are like that.

Few people want to be in the big cities at night because stabbings and muggings happen and the street are full of feces and fentanyl.

Diversity noise x diversity movies x diversity pricing x diversity crime x diversity feces x diversity fentanyl.

No thanks.

Comment Re:Don't tell Microsoft (Score 2) 15

Correct. This is what big tech has been trying to do for years: know EVERYTHING everyone does on their devices. Any excuse of the most modest "improvements" and "AI support" is just to get the users to be ok with it or at least don't balk too much.

"We record your every action and perform full AI analysis on it so the regime^h^h^h^h^h^h^hYOU, of course YOU only YOU can know and recall what you were doing illegally, I mean, privately on our, I mean, your device."

Comment Re: So what? (Score 0) 289

The USA cannot go against the interests of the banks for reasons that are insanely obvious and still absolutely taboo to talk about, because despite half the congresspeople openly and freely, and quite vehemently, presenting themselves as supporter of you know who, it is still considered false and wrong to repeat them in their own words and show the flags they have in their offices, on their office doors, on their lapels, during their speeches in front of the respective donor supergroup and during each of their first visits after being elected, which always and invariably goes to a certain old wall halfway across the globe.

Iceland could skip the banks that back then. That loophole was closed in 2018.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/...

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