That's because most EU armies are training organizations for the Big One that hopefully will never come. You don't draft 10% of the population into an army (like the plan was in Finland, some others thought less was enough) without a damn good reason, like foreign forces crossing the border or imminent threat of same.
The beauty of this system is that it is cheaper during the peace and during the war you get both the maximal bang and maximal bang for the buck. No, don't start praising the professional armies - they are more skilled, but for the same resources, they are miniscule. Sure, for biggest countries even that is enough to overrun pathetic third world dictatorships, but anyone whose threat scenario is a third world dictatorship doing mumble doesn't have real threats.
They'll have to pick between the Socialist feel-good insane welfare programs that they have over there and their national defense.
Bwahahaha! Tell me, where's the threat that the current EU national defence is insufficient to counter? Right, there isn't one. US troops can leave tomorrow and no-one needs to care.
Watertight means that the water that goes in doesn't come out. Every engineer that has built anything "waterproof" knows this.
But to be serious, I'm pretty sure that real immersion-proof safes with tight enough tolerances for real o-ring seals are insanely expensive. And you'll have to inspect the seals every time you close the safe, even a tiny bit of crud can let the water in.
Make sure the thermal resistance to and from the peltier is as low as possible. Large thermal resistance means large temperature differential across the peltier and this really kills the efficiency. Big heatsinks with fans on both sides of the peltier are a must for an effective fridge, a can-cooler could be made to work with one heatsink and a sleeve for the can.
If possible, use an oversize peltier. The peltiers I have seen have a significant peak in the coefficient of performance (the ratio of transferred heat to input power) at around 1/4 power. My DIY fridge cools to ambient minus 16C at 12 watts and ambient minus 20C at 50 watts. The peltier is rated for 56 watts max. Running at or near maximum power is not efficient. The coefficient of performance is lowered by both the increased input power and the increased temperature differential.
Right, let's drag both Hitler and religion into the conversation. Why do you hate this thread?
Let's rephrase what you just said: I mean, some places *said* they were communists, but North Korea also calls itself the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea". That still doesn't make North Korea a republic, a democracy or people's anything.
You people need to read more Greg Bear, he gets it partly right in Eon, I think.
I'd put my bets on another Greg, Greg Egan. His story "Transition Dreams" is about the implications of uploading the mind and perhaps the most chilling sf story ever written. His books (Permutation City, Diaspora, Schild's Ladder at least) also deal with the same issues.
Couple of years ago I saw a meteor that was big enough and close enough to see pieces breaking off it. (And it lit up the landscape too, for a second.) These tiny-streaks-in-the-sky just haven't been able to impress me much after that.
Do they have low expectations or why is the project named after a fictional character who was rather bonkers and fought windmills?
Well, since the impactor weighs nearly nothing compared to an 500m asteroid and is going to have negligible effect, it's named very accurately. The whole point of this thing is that it's easier to scale up from something than to start completely from scratch.
Think about it - as long as there are people out there that are willing to fly a passenger plane into a tall building, we shouldn't create an even bigger target.
The window of opportunity for flying airliners into anything closed on 11.9.2001 before the fourth plane reached its target. Let's rather worry about the unknown unknowns.
it now becomes trivial to get things up into space, and therefore you're more willing to use them more often and waste them on smaller targets.
Do the math and you'll see that it doesn't work. Whatever you're "dropping" (never mind that you can't drop anything from orbit, that's why it's called an orbit) will be either too fast (vaporizes on the way down) or too slow to do any serious harm. Next!
The result is that adjacent APs have to share the spectrum.
I once thought up a solution for this. The APs could have active antennas with a grid of elements, much like modern military radars. This sort of antenna is directional and the beam is electronically steerable. As long as there was a different band for downstream and upstream, interference would be virtually eliminated.
Finding the client's direction and the schedule for listening to the clients would have to be somehow solved.
This sort of AP wouldn't be exactly cheap, though...
What are you talking about? It had a planned life of 5 years, and they finally (purposefully) deorbited it at the ripe old age of 13 years. How is this neglect? You think they should have kept the old clunker going forever?
For those thinking of suggesting that Soyuz would work, might I remind you that every Soyuz capsule is a one time use vehicle. Even when everything goes right, it doesn't get re-used.
So? Who cares about that? It's still a lot cheaper than the reusable alternative. Why crave for reusability just for reusability's sake?
The shuttle may not be perfect. It was designed for a set of missions that have very little to do with what it is doing now.
Its biggest flaw is that when they thought it up, they envisioned much, much smaller maintenance, overhaul and refit costs per launch. That would have permitted a much greater frequency of flights and achieved a radically lower $/lb (or/kg) cost to orbit than non-reusable designs. That really didn't work out, and the special abilities (like satellite repair) haven't had that much demand either. Only in special cases (like the "contact lenses for Hubble") has that been useful. At $500M per launch, it's not very cost effective to go and repair most of the stuff out there.
The russians orbited their shuttle (Buran) once and canceled it as too expensive. European shuttle designs mostly never got off the drawing board - too expensive again. They're on the radar still, though.
If you think we need a better design, I am all for it.
Pretty much everyone agrees that the new design should be cheaper. And the big, expensive, do-it-all design like the shuttle doesn't seem to be the ticket for that. (If we just had some sort of low-maintenance, single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane, that would be great, but we don't have the tech for that. A SSTO spaceplane would need to be something like 97% fuel with chemical fuels...)
ESA is planning to launch a new non-reusable design (ATV, Automated Transfer Vehicle) next year. It's basically a Progress-like cargo truck that can lift 21 tons to ISS. That's actually pretty close to what the shuttle can lift there - but the shuttle does it at around double the price per launch.
Giant missile would have been more accurate. It did cause a bit of a scare when the Soviets fielded it, with the relatively massive throw weight of 8 tons and a range that allowed it to be fired over the Antarctic, bypassing US's northern early-warning systems.
And smallpox virus was "even more terrifying" than ten cities vaporized??? Some people are frightened of the oddest things.
True! Just one example: Aum Shinrikyo attacked the Tokyo subway with nerve gas: 12 dead. Some garden variety nutter attacked a Korean subway with a milk carton full of gasoline: 120 dead. And you can bet about which one of these people are insanely, pants-shittingly scared. And it ain't the gasoline.
but also implant radiation into the environment to cause a dead zone for years to come.
Not really. Weapons larger than 100 kilotons generally create a firestorm larger than the lethal blast radius. Think Dresden^2, hurricane-level winds etc. That pretty much cleans up the city of everything, including radioactive material.
Of course rebuilding the city might not be much easier than building it from scratch elsewhere...
The USSR folded because they drove their own economy into the ground. And they drove their own economy into the ground because they were trying to keep pace with Reagan's astronomical military expenditures.
Sorry for shouting, but NO THEY DIDN'T. That happens to be a bunch of bullshit. Reagan was boosting US military expenditures, but Soviet expenditures remained essentially constant. This has been verified after the opening of the Soviet-era archives.
Being able to evenly divide things into thirds and/or fourths is VERY handy in Real Life.
Especially construction.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Look at the friggin' blueprints of what you're constructing, look at the raw materials, measure according to blueprints, cut, assemble, repeat. NO division required. What are you constructing anyway where you need to divide stuff into thirds? And how easy is it to divide that 2' 1 5/16" piece of plywood into thirds anyway? Remember to take the loss into account too, unless you have a molecular monofilament cutter.
Actually, the US uses 110V because they have better wires.
Are you serious? You got that exactly backwards. US has to use thicker, more expensive wires everywhere because of the lower voltage. Of course the both systems use the thinnest, cheapest wires they can get away with. In the 220V system the wires for the same power are a lot thinner than in the 110V system.
You can find many pages with "Tesla transmit electricity".
Tesla didn't plan on transmitting electricity through radio waves - he had a much weirder idea. He planned on moving so much charge from the earth to the toploads of his transmitting towers that it would cause a voltage swing of several volts in the "ground potential" all over the globe... (at several tens of kilohertz)
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That's because most EU armies are training organizations for the Big One that hopefully will never come. You don't draft 10% of the population into an army (like the plan was in Finland, some others thought less was enough) without a damn good reason, like foreign forces crossing the border or imminent threat of same.
The beauty of this system is that it is cheaper during the peace and during the war you get both the maximal bang and maximal bang for the buck. No, don't start praising the professional armies - they are more skilled, but for the same resources, they are miniscule. Sure, for biggest countries even that is enough to overrun pathetic third world dictatorships, but anyone whose threat scenario is a third world dictatorship doing mumble doesn't have real threats.
They'll have to pick between the Socialist feel-good insane welfare programs that they have over there and their national defense.
Bwahahaha! Tell me, where's the threat that the current EU national defence is insufficient to counter? Right, there isn't one. US troops can leave tomorrow and no-one needs to care.
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Watertight means that the water that goes in doesn't come out. Every engineer that has built anything "waterproof" knows this.
But to be serious, I'm pretty sure that real immersion-proof safes with tight enough tolerances for real o-ring seals are insanely expensive. And you'll have to inspect the seals every time you close the safe, even a tiny bit of crud can let the water in.
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Right, let's drag both Hitler and religion into the conversation. Why do you hate this thread?
Let's rephrase what you just said: I mean, some places *said* they were communists, but North Korea also calls itself the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea". That still doesn't make North Korea a republic, a democracy or people's anything.
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No, they get your money, and some other guy's money, and an occupied seat, because they overbooked the plane.
And, at least in capitalistic theory, the competition forces the airline's savings to be passed to the customer...
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I'd put my bets on another Greg, Greg Egan. His story "Transition Dreams" is about the implications of uploading the mind and perhaps the most chilling sf story ever written. His books (Permutation City, Diaspora, Schild's Ladder at least) also deal with the same issues.
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Well, since the impactor weighs nearly nothing compared to an 500m asteroid and is going to have negligible effect, it's named very accurately. The whole point of this thing is that it's easier to scale up from something than to start completely from scratch.
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The window of opportunity for flying airliners into anything closed on 11.9.2001 before the fourth plane reached its target. Let's rather worry about the unknown unknowns.
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Do the math and you'll see that it doesn't work. Whatever you're "dropping" (never mind that you can't drop anything from orbit, that's why it's called an orbit) will be either too fast (vaporizes on the way down) or too slow to do any serious harm. Next!
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Harsh? Yeah.
Effective? No.
Mind telling me how that stops a terrorist intending to ignite an all-out war between the western world and the Islamic world?
And how are you going to convince anyone that you're serious? Coz just sayin' so ain't gonna cut it. Talk's cheap.
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Sigh. Do you know why blindly believing the most outrageous bullshit about EU is called the "bent-banana syndrome"?
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I once thought up a solution for this. The APs could have active antennas with a grid of elements, much like modern military radars. This sort of antenna is directional and the beam is electronically steerable. As long as there was a different band for downstream and upstream, interference would be virtually eliminated. Finding the client's direction and the schedule for listening to the clients would have to be somehow solved.
This sort of AP wouldn't be exactly cheap, though...
--
What are you talking about? It had a planned life of 5 years, and they finally (purposefully) deorbited it at the ripe old age of 13 years. How is this neglect? You think they should have kept the old clunker going forever?
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So? Who cares about that? It's still a lot cheaper than the reusable alternative. Why crave for reusability just for reusability's sake?
The shuttle may not be perfect. It was designed for a set of missions that have very little to do with what it is doing now.
Its biggest flaw is that when they thought it up, they envisioned much, much smaller maintenance, overhaul and refit costs per launch. That would have permitted a much greater frequency of flights and achieved a radically lower $/lb (or /kg) cost to orbit than non-reusable designs. That really didn't work out, and the special abilities (like satellite repair) haven't had that much demand either. Only in special cases (like the "contact lenses for Hubble") has that been useful. At $500M per launch, it's not very cost effective to go and repair most of the stuff out there.
The russians orbited their shuttle (Buran) once and canceled it as too expensive. European shuttle designs mostly never got off the drawing board - too expensive again. They're on the radar still, though.
If you think we need a better design, I am all for it.
Pretty much everyone agrees that the new design should be cheaper. And the big, expensive, do-it-all design like the shuttle doesn't seem to be the ticket for that. (If we just had some sort of low-maintenance, single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane, that would be great, but we don't have the tech for that. A SSTO spaceplane would need to be something like 97% fuel with chemical fuels...)
ESA is planning to launch a new non-reusable design (ATV, Automated Transfer Vehicle) next year. It's basically a Progress-like cargo truck that can lift 21 tons to ISS. That's actually pretty close to what the shuttle can lift there - but the shuttle does it at around double the price per launch.
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"Satans jävla jävla jävla jävla..." -Swedish general watching the JAS Gripen on its maiden flight coming down the runway - rolling.
There's a funny t-shirt about that, the ship "Wasa" and swedish military engineering somewhere.
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Giant missile would have been more accurate. It did cause a bit of a scare when the Soviets fielded it, with the relatively massive throw weight of 8 tons and a range that allowed it to be fired over the Antarctic, bypassing US's northern early-warning systems.
And smallpox virus was "even more terrifying" than ten cities vaporized??? Some people are frightened of the oddest things.
True! Just one example: Aum Shinrikyo attacked the Tokyo subway with nerve gas: 12 dead. Some garden variety nutter attacked a Korean subway with a milk carton full of gasoline: 120 dead. And you can bet about which one of these people are insanely, pants-shittingly scared. And it ain't the gasoline.
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Not really. Weapons larger than 100 kilotons generally create a firestorm larger than the lethal blast radius. Think Dresden^2, hurricane-level winds etc. That pretty much cleans up the city of everything, including radioactive material.
Of course rebuilding the city might not be much easier than building it from scratch elsewhere...
For reference, see City on Fire
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Sorry for shouting, but NO THEY DIDN'T. That happens to be a bunch of bullshit. Reagan was boosting US military expenditures, but Soviet expenditures remained essentially constant. This has been verified after the opening of the Soviet-era archives.
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No, it's not. The natural state of the human animal is eating, sleeping and fucking.
Never expected to find a Stakhanovite on Slashdot!
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Especially construction.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Look at the friggin' blueprints of what you're constructing, look at the raw materials, measure according to blueprints, cut, assemble, repeat. NO division required. What are you constructing anyway where you need to divide stuff into thirds? And how easy is it to divide that 2' 1 5/16" piece of plywood into thirds anyway? Remember to take the loss into account too, unless you have a molecular monofilament cutter.
--
Are you serious? You got that exactly backwards. US has to use thicker, more expensive wires everywhere because of the lower voltage. Of course the both systems use the thinnest, cheapest wires they can get away with. In the 220V system the wires for the same power are a lot thinner than in the 110V system.
--
Tesla didn't plan on transmitting electricity through radio waves - he had a much weirder idea. He planned on moving so much charge from the earth to the toploads of his transmitting towers that it would cause a voltage swing of several volts in the "ground potential" all over the globe... (at several tens of kilohertz)
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They could make a Stirling engine that you stick up your butt.
I think I'll file for a patent right now.
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