Take away the guns, and there will suddenly be a rise in stabbing, bludgeoning, and strangling crimes of passion. You took the tool away, but the desire remains. It will simply be carried out with another tool. There is far too much we use in modern life that can readily be used as a lethal weapon.
. Another reason is that it's a standard tactic of moral crusaders of all kinds to chip away at rights that they don't have the support to do away with all at once.
What rights are being chipped away here? You still run around bearing your arms to your hearts content.
You can't get a law passed that outlaws something directly, so you come at it sideways. You require X, which adds a small cost. Then you require Y, that adds a small additional cost. You file civil suit for something that isn't actually illegal, but you spin it as the little guy going after evil gun companies, and the jury gives it to you, making something legal in writ but illegal in practice, as other companies don't want to be similarly sued for it now that there is case precedent. All these little things build up, and eventually you get the initial outcome you wanted, but no one ever noticed it happen.
In this case, the microstamping is being done on the brass. The round is chambered. The hammer strikes the cap on the rear of the round, leaving the stamp. The bullets flies off and gets mangled. The brass gets ejected, and is discarded safely to the ground at your feet. Assuming you didn't think to grind down that stamp, and assuming the stamp hasn't worn/filled itself after repeated use, all that means is that someone fired your gun. Nothing matches the bullet to the brass. Nothing says the gun was fired there and the brass dropped naturally. Nothing says you were the one to fire the gun. It's nothing but circumstantial evidence.
Yes. You could do that, but that is not what this is for. This is specifically designed to perform operations that need to occur securely, against even physical access. It offers great possibilities for purposes of computer security, but chances are it won't be used for much beyond trying to prevent the rightful owner from doing things.
Explosives? Drills? Blasting? Rockets? Launchpads? You've got entirely the wrong idea about these things.
The Lunar soil is on average about 10 meters thick with some 8% aluminum by weight. You don't have to excavate for anything, you just scoop it right up off the ground. Refine it using various magnetic, evaporative, and electrostatic methods. That gets you large amounts of silicon, iron, aluminum, magnesium, and calcium, while small amounts of alloying metals can be brought up from Earth. Large scale refinement and manufacturing would require large scale facilities, but something small scale would not be difficult to set up. It could certainly be done within a few years, with a smaller budget than the ISS.
You don't launch from the Moon using rockets, you do it magnetically. Start small. A few dozen meters of linear motor would be enough for bulk payloads. Any surface water on the Moon evaporates and is lost, but the Moon does have sub-surface ice available for reclamation. Water means hydrogen and oxygen, which means fuel. Your deep space craft would only have to get themselves to low Earth orbit, before being refueled by cargo from the Moon. Remember, humans can't loiter around in the Van Allen belts for weeks as an ion drive slowly circles up to escape velocity. They need those high thrust chemical engines.
Keep extending that launch rail. At a kilometer or two, the acceleration is low enough to handle more complex structures. Once you hit around 100km, the acceleration is low enough to safely launch humans. The key issue is that this is not all-or-nothing. You don't need the whole massive facility in place to start reaping the benefits from it. Start slow, and build up to something bigger, all the while getting valuable experience in living on alien worlds.
Yes. You can make a decent cement out of Lunar soil. Send robots up first to manufacture thick cement domes, and you have ready-made habitats, safe from radiation and micrometeorite damage. You keep talking about "dropping stuff down a gravity well". You act as if everything we use is going to need to be sourced on Earth.
It's not like the energy needed to get into space is all that expensive. The only reason spaceflight is as costly as it is, is because we have a thick atmosphere to go through to get there. In order to keep heat and drag losses down, we have to go straight up, and hold off acceleration until we get through the thick stuff. If we didn't have that atmosphere to worry about, launching from a magnetic rail several hundred kilometers long would cost a couple orders of magnitude less than our current chemical fueled rockets.
That's exactly what we have on the Moon. You mine all your structural materials (aluminum) from the Moon. You build the thing on the surface of the Moon. You magnetically launch the whole gargantuan craft into orbit for dollars per kilogram, with a modest apogee kick motor. Launching from Earth sucks. Anything we can do to reduce how much we launch from Earth is a good thing.
You get two surge suppressors, install one with a wire to neutral, and a wire to one phase, and install the other one between neutral and the other phase. (Assuming standard US home electrics, which has neutral and 2x 115V phases 180 degrees apart, allowing 230V from both phases.
How would you ensure the two independent UPSs were properly phased for 230V appliances?
Actually, if you are only going to be using about 2 gallons of gas at a time, you only fill the tank with 2 gallons, rather than continuing to carry around an additional, unnecessary 12-16 gallons of gasoline. That's around 100lbs of weight savings right there, contributing slightly to improved efficiency from reduced rolling friction, and reduced braking losses with city driving. Also, be sure to remove those unnecessary extra car seats, the spare tire, the air conditioning unit, muffler, most of the exhaust piping, and washer fluid tank. Get the smallest, narrowest rims you can find too.
Right thinking, but math is a bit off. Your average car might use closer to 20-25hp at the wheel at 55mph. Below maybe 30-40mph, power primarily goes to rolling friction in the wheels. Above that, aerodynamic drag takes over, and power consumption goes up with the cube of velocity, so you really start ramping up quickly. For tractor trailers, the high load per wheel, and per frontal area, means rolling friction is more important and the cut-over velocity is a bit higher.
For local generation, better option would be for someone to start up large production of some ~2-5MW gas turbine. They are considerably smaller than comparable diesels, and while aircraft turbines are not all that efficient, they have to be lightweight, and a stationary turbine generator can use all sorts of tricks to bring up efficiency. Heavy regenerators exchange exhaust heat preheat the air going into the combustor, offsetting much of the fuel consumption. If you've got an abundant water supply, you can spray it into the engine, increasing air density (and specific power), as well as providing a cooling effect that allows for higher pressure ratios (and higher efficiency). The gas turbine will run off just about anything you want to throw at it, so use methane. We've got plenty of supply of that, and it's not difficult to reformulate new from scratch. More importantly, it lends itself well to temporary storage, and we have an existing distribution network, which would keep all this extra energy usage off the already stressed power grid.
The gas turbine will get within a couple percent of a diesel generator on its own, but the high temperature, high volume exhaust lends itself towards use in combined cycle operation. Run a rankine (steam) or sterling generator off the output heat. Provide hot water to the neighborhood. Open up a laundromat. Something particularly interesting might be use of a high efficiency (~60%), low cost solid oxide fuel cell, using the exhaust of the turbine as the oxygen supply, as gas turbines run very lean leaving plenty of usable oxygen in the exhaust, as well as providing the 800-1000C needed for operation. The exhaust could again be used as a heat source for a tertiary generator.
One thing I'm actually surprised about is that the commercial trucking industry didn't convert to a diesel electric system decades ago with rail. The trucks used on tractor trailers really aren't all that powerful, typically running on the order of 200-600hp. They don't need power, so much as the need torque, so you get very large turbo-diesels, running with an operating band only a few hundred RPM wide, and an equally large 18+ speed transmission to maintain that RPM range while accelerating. An electric motor could provide all the torque they need in a much smaller package, with a much wider operating range, and startup torque a diesel couldn't dream of. Give it a modest energy buffer for regenerative braking, and a small diesel generator. These have only started showing up in the last few years, and then only for local shuttles, things that ferry containers around a yard or city.
Right idea, wrong numbers. 6MHz channels running QAM-256 modulation are good for ~38.4Mbps, nearly double that of ATSC's 8VSB modulation. Also, I'm not aware of any cable companies switching over to H.264 (MPEG4 AVC). There's really just too large an installed user base.
Z2I used to provide this feature as an experimental courtesy. But then they got tired of the support and expense and ended it.
Close but not quite. Zap2It Labs was restricted to non-commercial use. Commercial applications were required to license the content independently for their users. A certain British guide data application saw its North American customer base drop below the point at which their per-user licensing costs allowed them to remain profitable. Rather than subsidize, refund, or outright abandon those customers, they instead cancelled their contract with the parent Tribune Media Services, and gave directions for their customers to sign up for the non-commercial Zap2It. They ruined it for everyone else.
Actually, virtually all Comcast users should be included in that "lucky few". Nearly all your channels should be DRM-free, meaning MythTV can capture them directly, digitally, using a CableCard tuner. The only things that should need analog capture are channels such as HBO or Showtime.
Why not reach out to those pirates and negotiate something? Like paying them a tax to let US ships through? Its kind of their waters after all...
Erm... no it's not. They're international waters, and the attacks are for their own personal gain. If they were acting under the auspices of a sovereign nation, they would be Privateers, not Pirates. Of course were that the case, Somalia would have been invaded and their government replaced years ago.
As mentioned, migration and dispersal, forcefully decreasing the population density to that which the area can now reasonably support after the reduction in fishing opportunities.
Because it's a pain in the ass to store, would not yield any better thermal efficiency in existing combustion engines, and would be rendered obsolete the moment we develop a decent battery technology.
Or just skip that whole hot steam step entirely...
compressor -> solar mirrors -> turbine ... and not have to deal with trying to source a clean abundant water source in the same area that you want a bunch of cheap, flat land, with good access to sunlight.
That's simply not true. Those little 8-bit microcontrollers are used all over the place. You probably have several in your desktop, some in your monitor, more in your TV, a whole bunch in your car. You just never see anyone trying to run one as the primary CPU on an interactive computer these days.
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Take away the guns, and there will suddenly be a rise in stabbing, bludgeoning, and strangling crimes of passion. You took the tool away, but the desire remains. It will simply be carried out with another tool. There is far too much we use in modern life that can readily be used as a lethal weapon.
. Another reason is that it's a standard tactic of moral crusaders of all kinds to chip away at rights that they don't have the support to do away with all at once.
What rights are being chipped away here? You still run around bearing your arms to your hearts content.
You can't get a law passed that outlaws something directly, so you come at it sideways. You require X, which adds a small cost. Then you require Y, that adds a small additional cost. You file civil suit for something that isn't actually illegal, but you spin it as the little guy going after evil gun companies, and the jury gives it to you, making something legal in writ but illegal in practice, as other companies don't want to be similarly sued for it now that there is case precedent. All these little things build up, and eventually you get the initial outcome you wanted, but no one ever noticed it happen.
In this case, the microstamping is being done on the brass. The round is chambered. The hammer strikes the cap on the rear of the round, leaving the stamp. The bullets flies off and gets mangled. The brass gets ejected, and is discarded safely to the ground at your feet. Assuming you didn't think to grind down that stamp, and assuming the stamp hasn't worn/filled itself after repeated use, all that means is that someone fired your gun. Nothing matches the bullet to the brass. Nothing says the gun was fired there and the brass dropped naturally. Nothing says you were the one to fire the gun. It's nothing but circumstantial evidence.
What if you cast your own bullets and do hand loading? The equipment really isn't that expensive, and for low volume, it doesn't take much time.
Yes. You could do that, but that is not what this is for. This is specifically designed to perform operations that need to occur securely, against even physical access. It offers great possibilities for purposes of computer security, but chances are it won't be used for much beyond trying to prevent the rightful owner from doing things.
Explosives? Drills? Blasting? Rockets? Launchpads? You've got entirely the wrong idea about these things.
The Lunar soil is on average about 10 meters thick with some 8% aluminum by weight. You don't have to excavate for anything, you just scoop it right up off the ground. Refine it using various magnetic, evaporative, and electrostatic methods. That gets you large amounts of silicon, iron, aluminum, magnesium, and calcium, while small amounts of alloying metals can be brought up from Earth. Large scale refinement and manufacturing would require large scale facilities, but something small scale would not be difficult to set up. It could certainly be done within a few years, with a smaller budget than the ISS.
You don't launch from the Moon using rockets, you do it magnetically. Start small. A few dozen meters of linear motor would be enough for bulk payloads. Any surface water on the Moon evaporates and is lost, but the Moon does have sub-surface ice available for reclamation. Water means hydrogen and oxygen, which means fuel. Your deep space craft would only have to get themselves to low Earth orbit, before being refueled by cargo from the Moon. Remember, humans can't loiter around in the Van Allen belts for weeks as an ion drive slowly circles up to escape velocity. They need those high thrust chemical engines.
Keep extending that launch rail. At a kilometer or two, the acceleration is low enough to handle more complex structures. Once you hit around 100km, the acceleration is low enough to safely launch humans. The key issue is that this is not all-or-nothing. You don't need the whole massive facility in place to start reaping the benefits from it. Start slow, and build up to something bigger, all the while getting valuable experience in living on alien worlds.
Yes. You can make a decent cement out of Lunar soil. Send robots up first to manufacture thick cement domes, and you have ready-made habitats, safe from radiation and micrometeorite damage. You keep talking about "dropping stuff down a gravity well". You act as if everything we use is going to need to be sourced on Earth.
It's not like the energy needed to get into space is all that expensive. The only reason spaceflight is as costly as it is, is because we have a thick atmosphere to go through to get there. In order to keep heat and drag losses down, we have to go straight up, and hold off acceleration until we get through the thick stuff. If we didn't have that atmosphere to worry about, launching from a magnetic rail several hundred kilometers long would cost a couple orders of magnitude less than our current chemical fueled rockets.
That's exactly what we have on the Moon. You mine all your structural materials (aluminum) from the Moon. You build the thing on the surface of the Moon. You magnetically launch the whole gargantuan craft into orbit for dollars per kilogram, with a modest apogee kick motor. Launching from Earth sucks. Anything we can do to reduce how much we launch from Earth is a good thing.
ReplayTV died because it allowed users to share recordings with other units over the internet.
You get two surge suppressors, install one with a wire to neutral, and a wire to one phase, and install the other one between neutral and the other phase. (Assuming standard US home electrics, which has neutral and 2x 115V phases 180 degrees apart, allowing 230V from both phases.
How would you ensure the two independent UPSs were properly phased for 230V appliances?
Most electric motors are AC based.
Actually, if you are only going to be using about 2 gallons of gas at a time, you only fill the tank with 2 gallons, rather than continuing to carry around an additional, unnecessary 12-16 gallons of gasoline. That's around 100lbs of weight savings right there, contributing slightly to improved efficiency from reduced rolling friction, and reduced braking losses with city driving. Also, be sure to remove those unnecessary extra car seats, the spare tire, the air conditioning unit, muffler, most of the exhaust piping, and washer fluid tank. Get the smallest, narrowest rims you can find too.
Right thinking, but math is a bit off. Your average car might use closer to 20-25hp at the wheel at 55mph. Below maybe 30-40mph, power primarily goes to rolling friction in the wheels. Above that, aerodynamic drag takes over, and power consumption goes up with the cube of velocity, so you really start ramping up quickly. For tractor trailers, the high load per wheel, and per frontal area, means rolling friction is more important and the cut-over velocity is a bit higher.
For local generation, better option would be for someone to start up large production of some ~2-5MW gas turbine. They are considerably smaller than comparable diesels, and while aircraft turbines are not all that efficient, they have to be lightweight, and a stationary turbine generator can use all sorts of tricks to bring up efficiency. Heavy regenerators exchange exhaust heat preheat the air going into the combustor, offsetting much of the fuel consumption. If you've got an abundant water supply, you can spray it into the engine, increasing air density (and specific power), as well as providing a cooling effect that allows for higher pressure ratios (and higher efficiency). The gas turbine will run off just about anything you want to throw at it, so use methane. We've got plenty of supply of that, and it's not difficult to reformulate new from scratch. More importantly, it lends itself well to temporary storage, and we have an existing distribution network, which would keep all this extra energy usage off the already stressed power grid.
The gas turbine will get within a couple percent of a diesel generator on its own, but the high temperature, high volume exhaust lends itself towards use in combined cycle operation. Run a rankine (steam) or sterling generator off the output heat. Provide hot water to the neighborhood. Open up a laundromat. Something particularly interesting might be use of a high efficiency (~60%), low cost solid oxide fuel cell, using the exhaust of the turbine as the oxygen supply, as gas turbines run very lean leaving plenty of usable oxygen in the exhaust, as well as providing the 800-1000C needed for operation. The exhaust could again be used as a heat source for a tertiary generator.
One thing I'm actually surprised about is that the commercial trucking industry didn't convert to a diesel electric system decades ago with rail. The trucks used on tractor trailers really aren't all that powerful, typically running on the order of 200-600hp. They don't need power, so much as the need torque, so you get very large turbo-diesels, running with an operating band only a few hundred RPM wide, and an equally large 18+ speed transmission to maintain that RPM range while accelerating. An electric motor could provide all the torque they need in a much smaller package, with a much wider operating range, and startup torque a diesel couldn't dream of. Give it a modest energy buffer for regenerative braking, and a small diesel generator. These have only started showing up in the last few years, and then only for local shuttles, things that ferry containers around a yard or city.
Right idea, wrong numbers. 6MHz channels running QAM-256 modulation are good for ~38.4Mbps, nearly double that of ATSC's 8VSB modulation. Also, I'm not aware of any cable companies switching over to H.264 (MPEG4 AVC). There's really just too large an installed user base.
Z2I used to provide this feature as an experimental courtesy. But then they got tired of the support and expense and ended it.
Close but not quite. Zap2It Labs was restricted to non-commercial use. Commercial applications were required to license the content independently for their users. A certain British guide data application saw its North American customer base drop below the point at which their per-user licensing costs allowed them to remain profitable. Rather than subsidize, refund, or outright abandon those customers, they instead cancelled their contract with the parent Tribune Media Services, and gave directions for their customers to sign up for the non-commercial Zap2It. They ruined it for everyone else.
Actually, virtually all Comcast users should be included in that "lucky few". Nearly all your channels should be DRM-free, meaning MythTV can capture them directly, digitally, using a CableCard tuner. The only things that should need analog capture are channels such as HBO or Showtime.
Why not reach out to those pirates and negotiate something? Like paying them a tax to let US ships through? Its kind of their waters after all...
Erm... no it's not. They're international waters, and the attacks are for their own personal gain. If they were acting under the auspices of a sovereign nation, they would be Privateers, not Pirates. Of course were that the case, Somalia would have been invaded and their government replaced years ago.
In other words, we need to stop it with all this autonomous drone nonsense, and just send a clone of Fred Rogers down there?
You fight piracy by going to the root cause and removing it.
One of the "root causes" is foreign corporations overfishing and dumping toxic waste off of their coastal waters, thereby ruining the local fishing industry and putting a LOT of Somalis out of the jobs. How would you go about solving that?
As mentioned, migration and dispersal, forcefully decreasing the population density to that which the area can now reasonably support after the reduction in fishing opportunities.
Because it's a pain in the ass to store, would not yield any better thermal efficiency in existing combustion engines, and would be rendered obsolete the moment we develop a decent battery technology.
Or just skip that whole hot steam step entirely...
... and not have to deal with trying to source a clean abundant water source in the same area that you want a bunch of cheap, flat land, with good access to sunlight.
compressor -> solar mirrors -> turbine
No. There's just not a whole lot of point to dumbing down rather simple concepts for people who really don't care in the first place.
Wasn't that a pretty typical system back when Debian first came out? And just where in the hell did you get a 75MHz 286?
That's simply not true. Those little 8-bit microcontrollers are used all over the place. You probably have several in your desktop, some in your monitor, more in your TV, a whole bunch in your car. You just never see anyone trying to run one as the primary CPU on an interactive computer these days.
Windows 3.1 will run on an 8-bit processor?