What's wrong with disassembling a computer WHILE IT IS RUNNING? Hell, most servers these days come with hot-swappable fans. You're supposed to open up the system while it is running, yank the fans out, and put new ones in.
I put a nice gouge in my thumb several years back, when I accidentally put it into an 120x38 Panaflo. Get a beefy enough fan with enough inertia and it will surely do some damage.
If your taxes drop to zero, you are correct, however that still is an oversimplification of the concept. The idea is that as you raise taxes, the market reacts to conserve money, and the total cash flux in the system decreases. Since your employer must pay you almost twice as much, they can only afford to hire half as many employees.
Most taxes are applied against the movement of money in the system, rather than the absolute quantity. Reduced flux means that increased tax rate is applied over a smaller value, resulting in reduced overall tax revenue. If you drop tax rates to zero percent, of course your proceeds from taxes will be zero, but the non-linear dynamics of the system mean your optimum long term rate is going to be unintuitively low.
They aren't "distractions", no. What he's saying is that they are things that will likely never be resolved. Because it's easy to take a stand on one side or another, and get a guaranteed following during an election. Politicians don't exist to fix problems, they exist to get re-elected, and the easiest way to do that is to have a couple hot buttons to press on publicly. Hell, Coneheads was released 20 years ago, and that whole movie was about capturing and deporting illegal aliens. Things don't really seem to have changed much since.
Yes, they DO pay more, proportionally. The road tax is made to pay for the maintenance and repair of roads, which is caused by the use of those roads. The problem is that while efficiency losses due to increased weight are linear, road wear due to increased weight is proportional to the fourth power. That 4000lb full size sedan may weigh twice as much, use twice as much fuel, and pay twice the taxes as that 2000lb compact, but it will cause roughly sixteen times the wear to the road. By all rights, it should be paying sixteen times the taxes to cover their "fair share" of repair work.
It all comes down to conservation of momentum. You throw stuff out the back, and to conserve momentum, you go faster. Eventually, you're going to run out of stuff to throw out the back (fuel), so the faster you throw it (specific impulse), the higher your final velocity will be. You could theoretically reach relativistic velocities using chemical rockets, but your payload fraction would approach zero. We use staging on rockets to cheat this limitation, in a sense, as we discard otherwise dead mass as we accelerate, making the remaining fuel more effective.
Actually, Carnot cycle efficiency is dependent exactly on the ratio between the hot and cold sides. Since an internal combustion engine runs between atmospheric temperature at ~300K, to peak combustion temperatures around 2000-3000K, a true adiabatic Carnot cycle would run at 85-90%.
That absolute finite Plank scale is so small as to be functionally irrelevant when speaking of classical Newtonian mechanics. The implications that are attempting to be explained are that within quantum mechanics, there is no distinct, solid particle that could be applied to Newtonian mechanics. The particle is just a probabilistic field, not because we simply don't know where it is, and as such are assigning a field where it probably is, but because that actually is its true nature.
Consider the original, double-slit experiment. Fire a beam of photons at such low intensity that there is no potential for interaction between sequential photons at a pair of slits. Even with no potential interference, the beam will still produce the familiar interference pattern, because the individual photons existed as this indeterminate, probabilistic field that simultaneously passed through both slits, rather than a classical particle that had an instantaneously well defined position.
If the article fails to accurately explain what it is reporting on, because the audience would fail to understand an accurate explanation anyway, is there any value to reporting to that audience in the first place?
These numbers seem excessive, so please correct me if I'm wrong. It's rather shocking that a pretty well designed, heavy coilgun only gives 1/75th the power of an average handgun.
Coilguns only do a few percent efficiency. Out of a claimed 500J propellent energy from the caps, only some 15J or so were transferred to the projectile.
That's why modern rifle rounds are unstable, but spin stabilized. Low weight and high velocity means they have good range and accuracy, as well as some ability to penetrate armor. Instability means when they are disrupted by some kind of resistance, like a human, they tend to yaw violently and then fragment. Technology to provide all the lethality of a hollow point bullet, but without violating the Geneva Convention.
In all honestly, the "coil gun" concept really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Electromagnetic coils can't be instantaneously turned on and off. The magnetic reluctance of your coil means it takes some amount of time for the field to come up to strength as power is applied, and some amount of time for the field to dissipate after power is removed. Even if you had tons of stages, and those stages were perfectly timed, the reluctance means that at the switching speeds you need to operate at, you're getting terrible efficiency. It's common for only a couple percent of the consumed electric energy to be converted to kinetic energy in the projectile. Coil guns are fine for large scale linear motors, but the scaling parameters don't work well for something handheld.
If you want a weapon, you want a railgun. Compared to a coil gun, it's dead simple. Make two rails. Put a conductive projectile at one end. Apply low voltage and ludicrous levels of current through the two rails. There's nothing really to control, you just dump everything you can, as fast as you possibly can, into those rails. With proper low resistance materials, energy transfer efficiency can reach into the several tens of percent range. The problem is that just as the projectile is being pushed along the rails, the rails are being pushed apart. As the rails flex away from the projectile, plasma arcing destroys the rails, so the real trouble is finding materials that can withstand the damage repeatedly, so you don't have to re-machine the barrel every couple shots.
The only thing reactors are put on these days are carriers, and submarines. The US Navy would be putting them on gas turbine powered ship, where there would be a large electric generator attached to the propulsion turbines.
Another reason chem propellants suck is the projectile can never, ever travel faster than the speed of sound of the column of compressed high pressure gas in the barrel, but at least in theory theres no reason an infinitely complicated coil gun couldn't launch stuff at any ridiculous speed.
That "speed of sound in the barrel" is interesting to think about... the pressure is so high in the barrel that the speed of sound might be 2 or 3 times, maybe even more, than the speed of sound in sea level air.
Almost right. The speed of sound is dependent on the temperature and molecular weight of the gas, but not on the pressure directly. While there is some play with the adiabatic ratio, if you compress a gas and then chill it back to the same temperature but higher density, the speed of sound will not have significantly changed.
Now there are some ways around this issue. Temperature is a big limiting factor, since you can only heat the gas so far before your materials fail. However, you are free to change the composition of the gas inside the barrel. Carbon dioxide, water vapor, and nitrites are all relatively heavy gases. On the other hand, hydrogen is extremely light. Liquid hydrogen rockets run fuel rich, sacrificing potential energy output for the higher exhaust velocity achievable by the lighter, uncombusted hydrogen gas. There is a field of high impact physics that use "light gas guns", using an explosive or hydraulic ram to drive a piston, compressing a large volume of hydrogen into a small barrel as a propellent gas. Projectile velocities upwards of 7km/s have been achieved.
Forget about natural gas. They're not burning natural gas, nor are they generating any electricity. They are only storage. They are proposing a 317MW storage facility, with no specified storage capacity, that is one county away from an existing ~1.2GW natural gas power plant.
LASER weaponry intended to blind was outlawed by the Geneva Convention. If the primary purpose of the laser is some purpose other than blinding troops, they are perfectly fine. In this case, the LASER isn't even the weapon, as it is just a part of the targeting system. In any case, the US never signed the Geneva Convention, and merely chooses to follow it at its own convenience.
That's the whole purpose of this thing. They're not just injecting oxygen into your blood stream, as like you said, that would cause an embolism. The oxygen is contained within a fatty liposome, and the gas slowly diffuses into solution through the membrane, rather than in any concentration capable of producing dangerous bubbles.
I would love to meet the man who uses a spear for self defense. I think they may very well may edge out Jonathan Goldsmith as the most interesting man in the world. That, or they're batshit crazy. Either way, good times are bound to be had...
If it is not a good gun control law, in that it completely ineffective, then by definition it must be a bad gun control law. Ineffective and superfluous laws do nothing but hassle law abiding citizens, and waste the time of politicians and bureaucrats who write up this shit.
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What's wrong with disassembling a computer WHILE IT IS RUNNING? Hell, most servers these days come with hot-swappable fans. You're supposed to open up the system while it is running, yank the fans out, and put new ones in.
Carbon brush dust? You mean these things aren't running brushless motors?
I put a nice gouge in my thumb several years back, when I accidentally put it into an 120x38 Panaflo. Get a beefy enough fan with enough inertia and it will surely do some damage.
If your taxes drop to zero, you are correct, however that still is an oversimplification of the concept. The idea is that as you raise taxes, the market reacts to conserve money, and the total cash flux in the system decreases. Since your employer must pay you almost twice as much, they can only afford to hire half as many employees.
Most taxes are applied against the movement of money in the system, rather than the absolute quantity. Reduced flux means that increased tax rate is applied over a smaller value, resulting in reduced overall tax revenue. If you drop tax rates to zero percent, of course your proceeds from taxes will be zero, but the non-linear dynamics of the system mean your optimum long term rate is going to be unintuitively low.
They aren't "distractions", no. What he's saying is that they are things that will likely never be resolved. Because it's easy to take a stand on one side or another, and get a guaranteed following during an election. Politicians don't exist to fix problems, they exist to get re-elected, and the easiest way to do that is to have a couple hot buttons to press on publicly. Hell, Coneheads was released 20 years ago, and that whole movie was about capturing and deporting illegal aliens. Things don't really seem to have changed much since.
Someone tell realityimpaired that he is an ass hat, as he is so wrong, I refuse to speak to him.
Yes, they DO pay more, proportionally. The road tax is made to pay for the maintenance and repair of roads, which is caused by the use of those roads. The problem is that while efficiency losses due to increased weight are linear, road wear due to increased weight is proportional to the fourth power. That 4000lb full size sedan may weigh twice as much, use twice as much fuel, and pay twice the taxes as that 2000lb compact, but it will cause roughly sixteen times the wear to the road. By all rights, it should be paying sixteen times the taxes to cover their "fair share" of repair work.
It all comes down to conservation of momentum. You throw stuff out the back, and to conserve momentum, you go faster. Eventually, you're going to run out of stuff to throw out the back (fuel), so the faster you throw it (specific impulse), the higher your final velocity will be. You could theoretically reach relativistic velocities using chemical rockets, but your payload fraction would approach zero. We use staging on rockets to cheat this limitation, in a sense, as we discard otherwise dead mass as we accelerate, making the remaining fuel more effective.
I don't recall seeing any polystyrene parts in my engine...
Carnot-cycle engines are maximum 35% efficient
Actually, Carnot cycle efficiency is dependent exactly on the ratio between the hot and cold sides. Since an internal combustion engine runs between atmospheric temperature at ~300K, to peak combustion temperatures around 2000-3000K, a true adiabatic Carnot cycle would run at 85-90%.
Did you stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night?
That absolute finite Plank scale is so small as to be functionally irrelevant when speaking of classical Newtonian mechanics. The implications that are attempting to be explained are that within quantum mechanics, there is no distinct, solid particle that could be applied to Newtonian mechanics. The particle is just a probabilistic field, not because we simply don't know where it is, and as such are assigning a field where it probably is, but because that actually is its true nature.
Consider the original, double-slit experiment. Fire a beam of photons at such low intensity that there is no potential for interaction between sequential photons at a pair of slits. Even with no potential interference, the beam will still produce the familiar interference pattern, because the individual photons existed as this indeterminate, probabilistic field that simultaneously passed through both slits, rather than a classical particle that had an instantaneously well defined position.
If the article fails to accurately explain what it is reporting on, because the audience would fail to understand an accurate explanation anyway, is there any value to reporting to that audience in the first place?
These numbers seem excessive, so please correct me if I'm wrong. It's rather shocking that a pretty well designed, heavy coilgun only gives 1/75th the power of an average handgun.
Coilguns only do a few percent efficiency. Out of a claimed 500J propellent energy from the caps, only some 15J or so were transferred to the projectile.
That's why modern rifle rounds are unstable, but spin stabilized. Low weight and high velocity means they have good range and accuracy, as well as some ability to penetrate armor. Instability means when they are disrupted by some kind of resistance, like a human, they tend to yaw violently and then fragment. Technology to provide all the lethality of a hollow point bullet, but without violating the Geneva Convention.
In all honestly, the "coil gun" concept really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Electromagnetic coils can't be instantaneously turned on and off. The magnetic reluctance of your coil means it takes some amount of time for the field to come up to strength as power is applied, and some amount of time for the field to dissipate after power is removed. Even if you had tons of stages, and those stages were perfectly timed, the reluctance means that at the switching speeds you need to operate at, you're getting terrible efficiency. It's common for only a couple percent of the consumed electric energy to be converted to kinetic energy in the projectile. Coil guns are fine for large scale linear motors, but the scaling parameters don't work well for something handheld.
If you want a weapon, you want a railgun. Compared to a coil gun, it's dead simple. Make two rails. Put a conductive projectile at one end. Apply low voltage and ludicrous levels of current through the two rails. There's nothing really to control, you just dump everything you can, as fast as you possibly can, into those rails. With proper low resistance materials, energy transfer efficiency can reach into the several tens of percent range. The problem is that just as the projectile is being pushed along the rails, the rails are being pushed apart. As the rails flex away from the projectile, plasma arcing destroys the rails, so the real trouble is finding materials that can withstand the damage repeatedly, so you don't have to re-machine the barrel every couple shots.
The only thing reactors are put on these days are carriers, and submarines. The US Navy would be putting them on gas turbine powered ship, where there would be a large electric generator attached to the propulsion turbines.
Another reason chem propellants suck is the projectile can never, ever travel faster than the speed of sound of the column of compressed high pressure gas in the barrel, but at least in theory theres no reason an infinitely complicated coil gun couldn't launch stuff at any ridiculous speed.
That "speed of sound in the barrel" is interesting to think about... the pressure is so high in the barrel that the speed of sound might be 2 or 3 times, maybe even more, than the speed of sound in sea level air.
Almost right. The speed of sound is dependent on the temperature and molecular weight of the gas, but not on the pressure directly. While there is some play with the adiabatic ratio, if you compress a gas and then chill it back to the same temperature but higher density, the speed of sound will not have significantly changed.
Now there are some ways around this issue. Temperature is a big limiting factor, since you can only heat the gas so far before your materials fail. However, you are free to change the composition of the gas inside the barrel. Carbon dioxide, water vapor, and nitrites are all relatively heavy gases. On the other hand, hydrogen is extremely light. Liquid hydrogen rockets run fuel rich, sacrificing potential energy output for the higher exhaust velocity achievable by the lighter, uncombusted hydrogen gas. There is a field of high impact physics that use "light gas guns", using an explosive or hydraulic ram to drive a piston, compressing a large volume of hydrogen into a small barrel as a propellent gas. Projectile velocities upwards of 7km/s have been achieved.
Forget about natural gas. They're not burning natural gas, nor are they generating any electricity. They are only storage. They are proposing a 317MW storage facility, with no specified storage capacity, that is one county away from an existing ~1.2GW natural gas power plant.
LASER weaponry intended to blind was outlawed by the Geneva Convention. If the primary purpose of the laser is some purpose other than blinding troops, they are perfectly fine. In this case, the LASER isn't even the weapon, as it is just a part of the targeting system. In any case, the US never signed the Geneva Convention, and merely chooses to follow it at its own convenience.
What kind of car? An old one with a mechanical carburetor, or one with a modern computer-controlled fuel-injected engine?
That's the whole purpose of this thing. They're not just injecting oxygen into your blood stream, as like you said, that would cause an embolism. The oxygen is contained within a fatty liposome, and the gas slowly diffuses into solution through the membrane, rather than in any concentration capable of producing dangerous bubbles.
I would love to meet the man who uses a spear for self defense. I think they may very well may edge out Jonathan Goldsmith as the most interesting man in the world. That, or they're batshit crazy. Either way, good times are bound to be had...
If it is not a good gun control law, in that it completely ineffective, then by definition it must be a bad gun control law. Ineffective and superfluous laws do nothing but hassle law abiding citizens, and waste the time of politicians and bureaucrats who write up this shit.
So you pick up the brass and drop it at the scene when you murder people.