67-Kilowatt Laser Unveiled 395
s31523 writes "Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has announced they have working in the lab a Solid State Heat Capacity Laser that averages 67 kW. It is being developed for the military. The chief scientist Dr. Yamamoto is quoted: 'I know of no other solid state laser that has achieved 67 kW of average output power.' Although many lasers have peaked at higher capacities, getting the average sustained power to remain high is the tricky part. The article says that hitting the 100-kW level, at which point it would become interesting as a battlefield weapon, could be less than a year away."
It will vaporize your head... Unless... (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, just a thought, it'll probably take the military billions of dollars and a decade or two to come up with something like that.
Blind Soldiers (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It will vaporize your head... Unless... (Score:2, Interesting)
This conversation reminds me of the ABM missile discussions, it costs 10 billion dollars to make an ABM system but only 50,000 for a couple engineers to think hard to make ultra hard to beat countermeasures.
Re:Yanks developing more weapons (Score:3, Interesting)
Well you're making a very narrow definition of free. Are you saying that a country that bases it's whole existence on unsustainable living and exploiting 3rd world countries is free?
I already named Venezuela as moving in the right direction, based on 1 definition of 'free'. Want more? Fine. The UK has distinguished itself from both the US and Australia by defending the rights of its citizens illegally captured by the US and imprisoned in Guantanimo Bay. They demanded the return of their citizens, and got it. So this demonstrates one kind of 'freedom' where the UK is ahead of the US ( my country, Australia refuses to ask for its citizens back ).
Want more examples? Fine. Australia is more 'free', because people can get access to high quality medical care when they need it ( OK, maybe 18 months late, but blame the Howard government for scaling it back ), via our public health system. In comparison, the US is probably the least 'free' of the industrialised world. Access to medical care is an important freedom. Same goes for education, where the US trails behind basically every OECD country.
How about the freedom of the media? The US is on a fast-track to a fascist state, with the level of merging of the ruling class and the media. There really is only 1 perspective that ever gets any traction in the mainstream media
Enough examples for you? Feel free to comment on them!
Sorry. These things were won outside of the official 'democratic' system, and in spite of it. You're talking about sustained grass-roots campaigns that threatened to overthrow the official system, so they had to make concessions. And keep in mind that these days if you turn up to a demo the way people involved in these movements did, you get sprayed with chemical weapons, shocked with tasers, and attacked with other so-called 'non-lethal' weapons, that in fact turn out to be more lethal than things would have been without them.
Show me one real reform that has been achieved inside the official 'democratic' system please. Your democracy is a joke, and the whole world is saying it. Seriously. You think you can impeach a president over his personal sexual activity ( and hey, I'm no supporter of Clinton ) and tell me you have a democracy? What he did was private business - the state has no business asking him questions about it or impeaching him over it. That's not democracy. That's the opposite. OK. So, Cliaponton's out. Then what? Then people vote the Democrats back in, but the Republicans and judicial system don't like the sound of that, so they order the vote count to cease, and appoint Bush president. That's not democracy. You don't order people to stop counting votes in a democracy.
Sorry dude. I am incredibly unconvinced that the US is 'free' in any sense of the word. You can think what you like at your own peril.
Popcorn, hell. It's an assassin in orbit. (Score:3, Interesting)
Do we really trust the new SuperPresidents(tm) that Bush has created with a silent assassin from orbit? How long until a terrorist(tm) is smoked? The family around him? An environmentalist - already labeled terrorists. Hell. PETA members are now semi-official terrorists. REPORTERS are being labeled fellow travelers. The Army already smoked one building full of reporters with a tank. They'd love them some lasers. We've killed one foreign head of state by hanging, another still is in prison on charges that no one understands. You think the New American Century Cheney/Rice types will hesitate one second in smoking a head of state?
What really worries me is, say, an individual with advanced power storage tech (coming soon) or a hybrid car generating enough juice to have a lovely laser handgun. Perfect as a targeting system, perfect as a killer. No noise, good for miles, untraceable by conventional means in real time. Also good for "riot" (AKA protest) control for unruly peons. Goes with the microwave cannon, the electrical stunner, the sound cannon.
In all of this, how exactly are we becoming safer? What the hell do we need this thing for? and once we show it can be done, the Chinese and the Indian research teams will whack their own models out in a couple of years, selling it to the highest bidder. STREET GANGS will have lasers in fifteen years.
Re:Yanks developing more weapons (Score:3, Interesting)
Free (adj): Having a legal respect for and protection of personal liberties.
I don't know what other definition you could be talking about; America has had a pretty constant definition of "free", and while we're not the only English-speaking country, we got our definition from the British Empire, which is where the rest of the English-peaking world got theirs, too.
I already named Venezuela as moving in the right direction, based on 1 definition of 'free'.
No, you didn't [slashdot.org]. Slashdot is not a mailing list; if you want to argue by reference, include a link.
The UK
(First rule of international law: there is no such thing as international law.)
The UK exeriting political defense of its citizens is just being a good government. Good governments and free nations are strongly correlated, but proving one does not prove the other.
Australia is more 'free', because people can get access to high quality medical care
By no stretch of our language does "free" mean "cared for." Public health care is a great idea that is good for the people and for the country as a whole, but it is not a freedom. Freedom is the ability to light up a cigarette, not the doctor taking it away from you.
Every mainstream media outlet backed the illegal invasion of Iraq. When the WOMD claims were found out to be false, every mainstream media outlet conveniently found something else to cover, resulting in the sad situation where 30% of Americans still believe to this day that Iraq had WOMD!
1: It wasn't illegal. (See above.) The UN never passed a resolution forbidding or condemning the invasion, and the first Iraq war ended with a peace treaty, which Saddam repeatedly violated. The invasion was one of choice, was sold on a lie, and is a distraction from the War on Terror as well as a generally bad idea -- but it's perfectly legal.
2: Iraq had WMDs. He used them on the Iranians and the Kurds. By the best accounts I've heard, Saddam thought that Iraq had WMDs.
3: Show me a poll, and let's check for bias. There's no regulation of polling in the United States, so "push polls" are common. Don't trust any number you hear where you don't see the question asked.
You show me a people who don't have access to [unbiased] reporting, and I'll show you a people who aren't free.
Every reporter in the world has bias. It's human nature. The important parts are a Choice of Reporter, and an Aknowlodgement of Bias. The worst reporters in the US are those who claim to be unbiased; the best are those who admit their own biases, especially when those biases may conflict with their reporting.
(And if you think embedded journalism turns the press into propaganda machines for public policy, you haven't actually watched US TV. The only thing putting reporters together with soldiers does is keep the reporter from bashing the soldier for the government's faults.)
These things were won outside of the official 'democratic' system, and in spite of it. You're talking about sustained grass-roots campaigns that threatened to overthrow the official system, so they had to make concessions.
What exactly do you think Democracy is for? It's to let the people change their government without killing anybody. The Civil Rights movement succceeded when they changed enough citizen's minds to make "I will support civil rights" an election-winning proposition, and the Civil Rights act was passed. (What didn't come from the CRA came from the courts, which only heard the cases at all because of the Freedom of any American to petition for the redress of grievances.)
Prohibition was enacted in the 18th Amendment, after a century-long crusade of demonstration,
Re:Get real (Score:4, Interesting)
Good to see you're starting out from a defensible position
BULLSHIT! You mean like in Vietnam? Or Iraq? Or Afghanistan ( while they were setting up the Taliban, and now )? Or when they assassinated the democratically elected leader of Chille in 9/11, 1973? Don't give me this 'America support democracy' crap please. I didn't come down in the last shower.
It's true that the economy of a bourgeois democracy under a capitalist system will grow the fastest out of all the organisations structures that we know. That isn't necessarily a good thing, but this is a topic for another discussion. The cold hard truth about the US economy is that it's not exactly riding the wave of exports at the moment. The US economy owes a lot more to its imports than it does to its exports . For example, the US is unbelievably dependent on China for a source of cheap labour. You don't see them pushing China towards a democracy, do you? The only places where the US mentions the word 'democracy' is where they have a natural research worth stealing, and then you can bet it's not democracy that will eventuate, but exactly the opposite. You see, democracy isn't something that is handed down from on high. It's something that people have to struggle for. It's a process. You can't bomb a country into democracy. And I'll say it again: the day when the US pushes for democratic reform in China ( and not via bombing, mind you ), is the day that I reconsider my statement that the US hates democracy.
Well, the thing is that there are plenty of US-bashers around at the moment. It goes without saying that the Arab world thinks as I do. Europe is no different
Lightcraft to space soon? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Get real (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to believe that too. It was actually quite the cherished notion. One of the worst things about our invasion of Iraq--and reading the many ugly truths that have come out regarding the run-up to the war--is that if I still want to believe in that notion, I'm now required to *not* believe in the US being a democracy.
The two statements:
"democracies don't make war"
and
"US is a democracy"
have been proven, in my eyes, to be mutually exclusive.
Germany (and other civilized countries) (Score:4, Interesting)
> Name one,
Germany.
> and explain how it's more free (not "a better place to live" or "more friendly to the environment").
If I'm a 17yo guy I can make pictures of my 15yo girlfriend and send them to my email-account
without both of us getting sued for posession and production of child pornography and being
trialed as adults and jailed for my own good.
Of course, I can't yell "Heil Hitler" on the street in Germany without getting into legal trouble but frankly,
I prefer to live in a country with people taking dirty pictures of themselves than in a country where
people feel the urge to yell "Heil Hitler" on the street.
Or being 17yo and getting a blowjob by a 15yo and 10years in jail?
(http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?pag
Or being 15yo and being charged with sexually abusing YOURSELF?
(http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetli
Or just google about your sodomy-laws?
You are only free if it comes to destroying and consuming.
(and yes, there are a lot of things wrong in Germany, too.)
Re:It will vaporize your head... Unless... (Score:1, Interesting)
The laser will evaporate itself!