I suggest you read (as a starter) Alan Clark's Barbarossa, which recounts how the Soviet Union was able to recover from the disaster of 1941, and includes detail on the rapid pace of Russian tank development during the war, and the German failure adequately to counter it.
The thing is, sites like wikileaks are GREAT at stopping liberal democracies, while they tend to be pretty powerless against oppressive dictatorships.
And your evidence for that is?
And you’d have to be a complete moron to suggest that the US actually wanted to turn the Vietnamese into Americans.
Do you know what a straw man argument is? Because you use it.
You seem, if I may say so, to have a minor anger management problem. Using terms like "moron" does not strengthen your assertions; you clearly think name calling is an argument.
And you might consider that Vietnam was an utterly unnecessary war; Ho Chi Minh was a realist, and if the US had supported him after DBP instead of taking over from the French, he'd have been a fervent believer in liberal democracy. I suggest you learn some history - every a biased historian like Barbara Tuchman is a lot more realistic about this than you are.
The Russians discovered the fallacy in that argument in 1941. Fortunately (for us in Europe) they had the T34. As for the Liberty Ships, I think you need to be introduced to the work of some Polish mathematicians, Alan Turing and Hut 6 for a more nuanced view.
Even in 1945, the Allied advance was often held up for long periods by children with Panzerfausts. Militarily, the Sherman (and the British Churchill) were terrible mistakes.
It can work backwards. At the Battle of Verdun in WW1, Petain (who only became an anti-hero in WW2) rotated French regiments through the Verdun front (a system called noria) so that whole regiments would not be destroyed. The Germans left their troops in battle till all were killed. From captured French uniforms and the number of regiments recorded, they greatly over-estimated the size of the French defense.
The example of WW2 is totally irrelevant. With current levels of surveillance and sigint, Germany would have been stopped long before they invaded Austria. The "hi-def coverage" of Kristallnacht and other Nazi atrocities would have let everybody know what was going on, before Hitler could re-arm Germany. Hitler was reassured by his American contacts that the US was at least neutral and possibly pro-German up until well into 1940. A German Wikileaks would have ensured that did not happen.
I expect to get moderated flamebait, but the reason the US lost the Vietnam war was quite simple, exactly the same as why Hitler lost against the Soviet Union: despite their awful Governments, both the Russians and the Vietnamese preferred their awful Governments to the alternative. The American inability to understand that not everybody wants to be American is itself a cause of war.
Please? "Break" is what happens when you accelerate a manual to 90 in 5th and then engage reverse and drop the clutch. Loss of way follows, certainly, but not in a good way. "Brake" is the thing next to the accelerator. You did it twice, so it wasn't an accidental typo.
Local generation reduces the load on the grid. The Germans are putting in a lot of micro CHP plants, using VW engines, for generation and heating. You can run an IC engine on methane very well - the lack of oil contamination and reduced carbon buildup in the heads means that you can expect high reliability and long service intervals. Add in solar PV (so the generator simply backs off when the sun shines), remote control so the generators are run when needed, and the grid becomes easier to manage. Approvals and NIMBYism cease to matter; the CHP plants go in garages and basements.
Look at it like this: a gas fueled CHP plant varies in efficiency from about 33% when generating alone to as much as 65% when used for heating as well. Companies are now making exhaust heat recovery exchangers as well, so the heating efficiency can reach over 80%. Over the year in Northern Europe, the efficiency can average around 50-55%. That is vastly better than the end to end achieved by the grid. Use micro natural gas generators to replace coal plants, and you have a 50% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions right there, using mainly off the shelf components and with 24h availability. That is what nuclear power has to compete with.
Can anyone clarify how this performs switching? As far as I can see, they do not elaborate on the source of switching power. Solenoids at that scale would be rather challenging. Electrostatics seems unlikely. Perhaps the actual power source is a lot of reprogrammed Maxwell's Demons.
We consistently see this in monitoring systems designed by other companies. In our own monitoring systems we make extensive use of sparse appends (i.e. data only gets added to when there is a significant change, and we maintain a timestamp for the last update for each entity being monitored so we know that monitoring is actually taking place.) Of course this puts a lot more up front effort into actual system design.
There seems to have been a period, roughly when hard drive capacity was rising more rapidly than application demands for data, when nobody cared too much. Before that, backing store was limited and we had to worry about data size. Now, application data sets are growing enormous even for quite trivial applications, and we need to worry about keeping data storage in bounds again.
I think you really need to read a primer on data mining. The attitude you describe is all too common and brings pain in its wake. If you find you want more than 65000 rows in a spreadsheet, your problem is almost certainly inappropriate for a spreadsheet solution. Even Access is vastly better, and if you (a) don't have even basic data mining and (b) the data is going out to PHBs, Filemaker is your friend.
Also, chances are, if you think any typical business data set is best represented by a spreadsheet, you are probably not qualified to make the call.
I think Apple have done this before, for instance with titanium cases (thin sections are rather prone to cracking) and the G4 cube with its tendency to stress cracking.Their problem is really quite simple. Once, Macs were better engineered than any other PCs: you could open them and see the well designed cabling, the clever internal ducting, and the properly engineered arrangement of boards, versus the thrown together stuff of many other manufacturers. But then CAD got cheap, and even cheap PCs became well designed internally and externally. The only way to go was "design" - which has two aspects; ergonomics on the one hand, and shiny on the other.
The difficulty is that sometimes non-shiny is the best way to go. Tough plastics are not necessarily pretty, shiny polycarbonates and acrylics can suffer cracking as well as scratches. More exotic materials bring new unexpected real world problems.
It's very difficult to pack all the functions into a small case like a phone and make it work well. My feeling is that in an effort to distance themselves from upstart makers like HTC, and manufacturers with their own fabrication like Samsung, Apple simply put too much effort into shiny because they had got about as far as they could with ergonomics, given the CPU and battery available.
It's good enough. I'd like a bigger screen...but why would Nokia bother when (a) there is literally no competition and (b) the market is limited to people who know how to get the best out of it?
Less efficient and less robust than Diesels, don't scale so well, and when the priority is weight and portability, solar PV is better than solar concentrators. This is why they are driving around on the road near you.
German tanks ran on gasoline. Russian tanks ran on Diesel. Less dangerously flammable, much lower fuel consumption, and if you can get the fuel to the injector and turn the engine over it will ignite. These were among the decisive factors at Kursk, possibly the turning point of WW2.
It wasn't the environmentalists. They were just the excuse. The truth is that nuclear power was introduced much too soon, before the problems were fully understood. The first plants were under-designed before all the problems of metallurgy and construction were sorted out, (both Windscale and Chernobyl were indirectly the result of a metallurgical problem) and the problem of waste wasn't sufficiently addressed. The same is true of steam power, but the nineteenth century history of boiler explosions and fires resulted in smaller disasters, in a day when communications were such that most people didn't know how many there were.
The end result was that nuclear power turned out to be more expensive than coal or gas, so nobody wanted to build nuclear plants as there seemed to be no compelling reason to do so.
The latest designs are still proving hard to commercialise (I take part in the UK's consultation, I see the papers) and it is proving hard to get across that dry storage of waste for about 100 years is actually the best solution, because it looks like an excuse for not building a repository.
So, as someone who believes that we do need more nuclear power, I think you are utterly and completely wrong. It would have been better had we not built nuclear plants till around 2000, when we knew what we were going. We would then be able to put them in the right places, and we would not have a horrifying build up of unidentified and hard to treat hot waste. What has harmed nuclear power is short sightedness and gung-ho engineering. By the time nuclear power becomes acceptable, we may well have had to put other solutions into place.
If you're a pirate, having a few senior executives of the local cathedral on board (whether as hostages or supporters) probably helps more than a few cannon, which wouldn't stand a chance against a missile cruiser.
At 60mph your van is going to need a continuous 20kw. That's assuming no hills where you live. The acceleration will be poor to say the least.
Now let's take the assumption that you need a minimum range of 60 miles. Allowing for acceleration loads, you are going to need a usable 25kwH capacity.
The nominal capacity of a standard 110AH lead acid cell is 1.3kw, but if you try it, you will get it once only. In reality, at motor loads you will get about 80% efficiency, but if you discharge more than 40% of theoretical the battery will start to degrade quite fast (you can easily check this if you read up the detail data sheets on e.g. the Yuasa website.) That means that in real world use, your lead acid battery will give you about 400WH. Your 25kwh will therefore need about 60 of those batteries. At 80lb each including tie down and cable, that's 4800lb of batteries - over two tonnes.
Stick that in your van and you will need bigger tires, uprated suspension, but also you will need more power for acceleration now it weighs more than twice as much. So you'd better uprate that 25kw to 40 - oops, your battery pack now weighs three tonnes. Time for another iteration. In the end, you realise that you just cannot get that performance envelope with lead acid cells.
Now do you understand why electric vehicles are hard to design, and why people who have actually got PhDs in electric engineering and battery design have so far been unable to deliver a worthwhile EV?
Unfortunately many economists seem to fail to take into account the actual difficulties of developing and introducing new technologies. They like to use the example of wartime, but in fact that isn't a good one - as military technology gets more advanced, it too is taking ever longer to get into production.
The point is that we have workable approaches in a short timescale - consumption reduction using insulation, legislation and smaller vehicles. We have workable approaches in the 5-10 year scale (wind and offshore wind), and in the 10-20 year scale (nuclear and replacement of coal with gas fired plants). All the bio and geo engineering approaches have huge potential downsides and would be unlikely to be proven safe for use, or workable in much under 20-30 years. And then we have fusion, which in 1960 was 10 years in the future and now in 2010 is reckoned to be 60 years in the future, if you believe the reports in that treehugger rag Scientific American.
Lomborg now seems to be significantly backtracking on his earlier views, and Dyson is simply negligible - he is a retired physicist, from a generation when physicists were generally quite ignorant of statistics, not a climatologist or a mathematical modeller. It is hard to find any qualified people who would support him.
The issue here is that you AGW deniers simply have a new tack - the argue that we need to do "some science, some research" because you don't like the results of all the science and research so far, and so simply extend into the future the time when we actually need to do anything. You are like people who are trying to prove that a coin isn't biased. Every time it's tossed it comes up heads, and you keep asking for one more toss in the hope it comes up tails - somehow imagining that the one tail will somehow negate the long sequence of heads. It is human nature - but it is not science, or a good basis for public policy.
This is pure speculation about technologies that may or may not be feasible. What is clear is that suitable plants won't be developed in a short timeframe, and then will take years to grow to the point at which they have any real effect. By which time warming will have reduced yields in much of the world to the point at which we won't be using land to sequester carbon but to grow food.
This is a plug by the biologists for R&D dollars - why should the physicists (solar power and nuclear) and the engineers (wind and hydro) get all the attention?
Altering our behaviour isn't really that hard or expensive. Installing extensive insulation, an efficient boiler and solar PV, and converting a small patch of wasteland into a vegetable patch, has reduced our carbon usage by around 30% in little more than a year. Many people could achieve much more; a lot of people in the US and the UK still don't have double glazing, which reduces heating and aircon loads alike, and there are still far too many single-occupancy SUVs and light trucks on our roads. What's more, these things actually save money - if AGW turned out to be a myth tomorrow, the financial crisis would still be here and I would still be better off because of the actions I've taken.
Messing with plants should be a long way down the list, after simple things that can be done with established technology have been fully utilised, and not before.
British protests against the war in Iraq were extensive, but Blair was so excited by getting close to Bush that he ignored them.
Today he can't appear in public in the UK (the security would be too expensive) and his protégé David Miliband has just narrowly lost the chance of being the next Prime Minister, with many people thinking that his support for the war tipped the balance. Protests change public opinion, perhaps only a little, but sometimes decisively. You appear to be falling into the trap of so many USA citizens, of despising "soft power". But the values of your Founding Fathers are today being more undermined by the "soft power" of lobbyists and journalists than by any display of force.
For extra flamebait, it's been suggested that around 10% of the French fatalities at Verdun in WW1 were "friendly fire". Traditionally the military has been more dangerous to its own side than the enemy; until modern medicine and transport, more soldiers got killed (by disease, climate, training and brutality) outside active warfare than in it. Cue realistic war games in which syphilis and typhoid are far more dangerous than enemy action.
You would have, in effect, to show that Sky were negligent in ensuring that the requester of the data compliant with the Act. This is the Act that was rushed through in the dying days of New Labour by Mandelson in an effort to retain the support of...the Murdochs, major Sky shareholders.
So I would say, no chance. Go after the "law firm".
Slashdot Mirror
Just make sure your house is a destination for a lot of rich, well-connected climbers who will ensure your telco gets lots of publicity.
I suggest you read (as a starter) Alan Clark's Barbarossa, which recounts how the Soviet Union was able to recover from the disaster of 1941, and includes detail on the rapid pace of Russian tank development during the war, and the German failure adequately to counter it.
And your evidence for that is?
Do you know what a straw man argument is? Because you use it.
You seem, if I may say so, to have a minor anger management problem. Using terms like "moron" does not strengthen your assertions; you clearly think name calling is an argument.
And you might consider that Vietnam was an utterly unnecessary war; Ho Chi Minh was a realist, and if the US had supported him after DBP instead of taking over from the French, he'd have been a fervent believer in liberal democracy. I suggest you learn some history - every a biased historian like Barbara Tuchman is a lot more realistic about this than you are.
Even in 1945, the Allied advance was often held up for long periods by children with Panzerfausts. Militarily, the Sherman (and the British Churchill) were terrible mistakes.
It can work backwards. At the Battle of Verdun in WW1, Petain (who only became an anti-hero in WW2) rotated French regiments through the Verdun front (a system called noria) so that whole regiments would not be destroyed. The Germans left their troops in battle till all were killed. From captured French uniforms and the number of regiments recorded, they greatly over-estimated the size of the French defense.
I expect to get moderated flamebait, but the reason the US lost the Vietnam war was quite simple, exactly the same as why Hitler lost against the Soviet Union: despite their awful Governments, both the Russians and the Vietnamese preferred their awful Governments to the alternative. The American inability to understand that not everybody wants to be American is itself a cause of war.
Please? "Break" is what happens when you accelerate a manual to 90 in 5th and then engage reverse and drop the clutch. Loss of way follows, certainly, but not in a good way. "Brake" is the thing next to the accelerator. You did it twice, so it wasn't an accidental typo.
Look at it like this: a gas fueled CHP plant varies in efficiency from about 33% when generating alone to as much as 65% when used for heating as well. Companies are now making exhaust heat recovery exchangers as well, so the heating efficiency can reach over 80%. Over the year in Northern Europe, the efficiency can average around 50-55%. That is vastly better than the end to end achieved by the grid. Use micro natural gas generators to replace coal plants, and you have a 50% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions right there, using mainly off the shelf components and with 24h availability. That is what nuclear power has to compete with.
If you are right and they are using relatively high DC for switching, the rapid wearout is quite unsurprising.
The ghost of Alan Turing wants a word with you.
Can anyone clarify how this performs switching? As far as I can see, they do not elaborate on the source of switching power. Solenoids at that scale would be rather challenging. Electrostatics seems unlikely. Perhaps the actual power source is a lot of reprogrammed Maxwell's Demons.
There seems to have been a period, roughly when hard drive capacity was rising more rapidly than application demands for data, when nobody cared too much. Before that, backing store was limited and we had to worry about data size. Now, application data sets are growing enormous even for quite trivial applications, and we need to worry about keeping data storage in bounds again.
Also, chances are, if you think any typical business data set is best represented by a spreadsheet, you are probably not qualified to make the call.
The difficulty is that sometimes non-shiny is the best way to go. Tough plastics are not necessarily pretty, shiny polycarbonates and acrylics can suffer cracking as well as scratches. More exotic materials bring new unexpected real world problems.
It's very difficult to pack all the functions into a small case like a phone and make it work well. My feeling is that in an effort to distance themselves from upstart makers like HTC, and manufacturers with their own fabrication like Samsung, Apple simply put too much effort into shiny because they had got about as far as they could with ergonomics, given the CPU and battery available.
It's good enough. I'd like a bigger screen...but why would Nokia bother when (a) there is literally no competition and (b) the market is limited to people who know how to get the best out of it?
Less efficient and less robust than Diesels, don't scale so well, and when the priority is weight and portability, solar PV is better than solar concentrators. This is why they are driving around on the road near you.
German tanks ran on gasoline. Russian tanks ran on Diesel. Less dangerously flammable, much lower fuel consumption, and if you can get the fuel to the injector and turn the engine over it will ignite. These were among the decisive factors at Kursk, possibly the turning point of WW2.
The end result was that nuclear power turned out to be more expensive than coal or gas, so nobody wanted to build nuclear plants as there seemed to be no compelling reason to do so.
The latest designs are still proving hard to commercialise (I take part in the UK's consultation, I see the papers) and it is proving hard to get across that dry storage of waste for about 100 years is actually the best solution, because it looks like an excuse for not building a repository.
So, as someone who believes that we do need more nuclear power, I think you are utterly and completely wrong. It would have been better had we not built nuclear plants till around 2000, when we knew what we were going. We would then be able to put them in the right places, and we would not have a horrifying build up of unidentified and hard to treat hot waste. What has harmed nuclear power is short sightedness and gung-ho engineering. By the time nuclear power becomes acceptable, we may well have had to put other solutions into place.
If you're a pirate, having a few senior executives of the local cathedral on board (whether as hostages or supporters) probably helps more than a few cannon, which wouldn't stand a chance against a missile cruiser.
Now let's take the assumption that you need a minimum range of 60 miles. Allowing for acceleration loads, you are going to need a usable 25kwH capacity.
The nominal capacity of a standard 110AH lead acid cell is 1.3kw, but if you try it, you will get it once only. In reality, at motor loads you will get about 80% efficiency, but if you discharge more than 40% of theoretical the battery will start to degrade quite fast (you can easily check this if you read up the detail data sheets on e.g. the Yuasa website.) That means that in real world use, your lead acid battery will give you about 400WH. Your 25kwh will therefore need about 60 of those batteries. At 80lb each including tie down and cable, that's 4800lb of batteries - over two tonnes.
Stick that in your van and you will need bigger tires, uprated suspension, but also you will need more power for acceleration now it weighs more than twice as much. So you'd better uprate that 25kw to 40 - oops, your battery pack now weighs three tonnes. Time for another iteration. In the end, you realise that you just cannot get that performance envelope with lead acid cells.
Now do you understand why electric vehicles are hard to design, and why people who have actually got PhDs in electric engineering and battery design have so far been unable to deliver a worthwhile EV?
The point is that we have workable approaches in a short timescale - consumption reduction using insulation, legislation and smaller vehicles. We have workable approaches in the 5-10 year scale (wind and offshore wind), and in the 10-20 year scale (nuclear and replacement of coal with gas fired plants). All the bio and geo engineering approaches have huge potential downsides and would be unlikely to be proven safe for use, or workable in much under 20-30 years. And then we have fusion, which in 1960 was 10 years in the future and now in 2010 is reckoned to be 60 years in the future, if you believe the reports in that treehugger rag Scientific American.
Lomborg now seems to be significantly backtracking on his earlier views, and Dyson is simply negligible - he is a retired physicist, from a generation when physicists were generally quite ignorant of statistics, not a climatologist or a mathematical modeller. It is hard to find any qualified people who would support him.
The issue here is that you AGW deniers simply have a new tack - the argue that we need to do "some science, some research" because you don't like the results of all the science and research so far, and so simply extend into the future the time when we actually need to do anything. You are like people who are trying to prove that a coin isn't biased. Every time it's tossed it comes up heads, and you keep asking for one more toss in the hope it comes up tails - somehow imagining that the one tail will somehow negate the long sequence of heads. It is human nature - but it is not science, or a good basis for public policy.
This is a plug by the biologists for R&D dollars - why should the physicists (solar power and nuclear) and the engineers (wind and hydro) get all the attention?
Altering our behaviour isn't really that hard or expensive. Installing extensive insulation, an efficient boiler and solar PV, and converting a small patch of wasteland into a vegetable patch, has reduced our carbon usage by around 30% in little more than a year. Many people could achieve much more; a lot of people in the US and the UK still don't have double glazing, which reduces heating and aircon loads alike, and there are still far too many single-occupancy SUVs and light trucks on our roads. What's more, these things actually save money - if AGW turned out to be a myth tomorrow, the financial crisis would still be here and I would still be better off because of the actions I've taken.
Messing with plants should be a long way down the list, after simple things that can be done with established technology have been fully utilised, and not before.
Today he can't appear in public in the UK (the security would be too expensive) and his protégé David Miliband has just narrowly lost the chance of being the next Prime Minister, with many people thinking that his support for the war tipped the balance. Protests change public opinion, perhaps only a little, but sometimes decisively. You appear to be falling into the trap of so many USA citizens, of despising "soft power". But the values of your Founding Fathers are today being more undermined by the "soft power" of lobbyists and journalists than by any display of force.
For extra flamebait, it's been suggested that around 10% of the French fatalities at Verdun in WW1 were "friendly fire". Traditionally the military has been more dangerous to its own side than the enemy; until modern medicine and transport, more soldiers got killed (by disease, climate, training and brutality) outside active warfare than in it. Cue realistic war games in which syphilis and typhoid are far more dangerous than enemy action.
So I would say, no chance. Go after the "law firm".