The demonstration I participated in years ago was a bit different, or at least I think it was as details are lacking here.
We did a demonstration where one person, A, with a training firearm stood in place. They were told that if the other participant made a move toward them they were to draw and say "bang" as rapidly as possible. The other participant,B , was standing 22 feet away with a concealed training knife. The only case in which A was able to draw and say bang before B had poked them with the knife was when they started with their hand grasping the firearm. Keep in mind that A was planning to shoot B the entire time and was just waiting to do it until B moved. That isn't a very realistic situation because in real life A frequently will not know if B poses a threat and will not have time to make that kind of fight or flight evaluation before being killed.
Things only get worse the less distance you have. I saw a program once where they were discussing and demonstrating the speed of a practiced disarm. It boiled down to a trained individual being able to deflect and disarm an oponent faster than could be possibly defended because of the time it takes to recognize an opponents action and then send the nerve signals to counter it. Basically whoever decides to take definitive action first has a huge edge.
Not all safeties are like what you imagine. Most Glock models have several safeties but they are all of the variety that prevent accidental discharge when the gun is dropped or something. There are no safeties that I am aware of for Glocks that prevent the gun from firing if you pull the trigger.
It is the Militia that is referred to as being "well regulated" not the gun ownership rights. Current federal law defines the militia of the US as being all able bodied Males between the ages of 17 and 45, and Female citizens who are members of the National Guard.
For a militia to be useful it needs to have armaments, which are impractical for the government to keep on hand just in case. The solution was and is to allow citizens to keep and maintain their own weaponry. In the event that they are called to active militia duty they then can bring their own weapons until production ramps up to meet supply requirements.
I agree that death threats are unacceptable whether made in person or anonymously over the internet.
Keys, or other locking devices are used in vehicles because they are often left for hours at a time unattended in public places, have a relatively high value, and would be trivial to steal otherwise as they provide their own mode of escape.
Have you ever known a gun owner that left their weapons unattended in public places on a daily basis for hours on end?
I would wager that a number of gun owners took it as a near death threat when they had their names and addresses published by a news paper who even provided an interactive online map of those addresses.
I seem to remember someone talking about a work of fiction where the prosecuting attorney was obligated to share the fate of anyone they got the death penalty for. I could see that working as a means to halt some prosecutorial misconduct but I can certainly imagine circumstances where it wouldn't.
Most of the breeder reactors I've read about have been based on the EBR I and II. In that case they are using a metal, rather than the typical oxide, fuel which means that pyroprocessing can be used instead of the horendously messy aqueous process you are talking about.
The EBR II was demonstrated to be passively safe. That is they performed tests that demonstrated what would happen in a full power loss or circulatory system failure. In all cases the reactor shut down the nuclear reaction safely and without damaging the core. Because these reactors aren't using water as the coolant they can operate at near atmospheric pressures even at very high temperatures. That means that you don't have to worry about the reactor vessel developing a high pressure leak and dumping radioactive crap into the environment. As the temperature climbs from lack of cooling the pressure doesn't rise like it would in a water cooled system. Also the core is designed such that as the temperature rises the fuel cladding expands and shuts down the reaction by increasing the separation between the fuel components.
The only real hazard seems to be with sodium coolant designs where special care has to be taken to not let the sodium come into contact with oxygen or water because that would cause fires. But this is far more simple than the LWR designs because you don't have to work with really high pressure containment in the reactor vessel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... A relatively small, self contained, transportable, autonomous reactor design. The fuel here wouldn't be reprocessed until the 15-30 year service life was used up. Then the unit would be returned to the manufacturer who would replace the fuel components and refurbish the unit and lease it back out again.
I watched an interesting documentary the other night where they showed live background radiation results from all around the world. The 3 highest spots they showed were Pripayat, Fukushima, and some naturally radioactive beach in Brazil. The really interesting thing to me was that the difference between Pripayat and say NYC wasn't that huge, the background count was around 3 times that of NYC. And people have been living in Pripayat for decades now with little to no measurable side affects. I certainly wouldn't advocate for weaker safety measures but the threat of toxifing huge tracts of land really seems to be overblown.
I urge you to do some reading on modern reactor designs. Remember the Japanese reactor you are pointing to as an example is first of all an ancient design and secondly is a LWR design, which is idiotic to begin with. A good place to start would be reading about the IFR design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Even if you go with LWR cores can and should be designed to shut down entirely on their own in the event of a melt down. There are several ways to do this but my favorite is providing multiple seperate spaces for the melted core to flow to in the event of a meltdown. The core can only sustain it's nuclear reaction so long as their is a critical mass of fissionable material. When the core melts and flows into the seperate sections you end up with several smaller masses of fuel which no longer has the critical mass necessary for nuclear reactions to continue. And that is a mind bogglingly simple safety feature to implement and disaster proof.
The problem is that the commercial industry went with designs based off a quick and dirty design meant for military applications. And it's safety mechanisms were designed mostly to handle risk by redundancy instead of being passively safe.
I am by no means an expert but the wikipedia page seems to only indicate either a rocky asteroid/meteor or worn out chunk of comet as serious possibilities. Given the evidence of magnetite speres, and their composition, in the soil and trees I would lean away from the comet theory myself.
The solar cell problem with efficiency sounds like an issue that might be better addressed by just not using solar cells to directly generate current. How about instead of hoisting heavy PV cells we put up a mirror array built of very thin foil. Arrange the mirrors to direct the light onto a working fluid and generate power using that? The only downside I can think of to that at the moment would be that the mirrors would have to be mechanized to track the sun.
Impactors actually hitting the ground would definitely cause more damage. But air bursts can still be devastating enough. Tunguska was an air burst and it leveled something like 2,000 square Kilometers of forrest. Granted Tunguska was much larger than the asteroids in this report.
I think one of the reasons that Skyrim appeals to so many people is because it models reality in a number of ways that people like. Doors being one of the best examples. I was thinking about it and I simply can't remember any doors that you couldn't open at all. I thought I found one once but it turned out you just had to initiate the Dark Brotherhood quest line to wind up inside that building. And there are a number of other doors that require some questing to enter, but the huge majority of doors can be opened at any point in the game. For games like Thief and Saints Row it would mean a little more development time designing some generic building interiors that you then use for all of those hundreds of unimportant doors to use.
In earlier versions of Minecraft skeletons could actually shoot you through the doors. Although I was never completely sure if that was because they could shoot through the transparent bits of the door or if doors were just bugged. Anyways it meant you had to make sure your front door didn't have a direct line of sight to the main parts of your house/cave. Otherwise you could get sniped in the 'safety' of your own home.
The subject of unbreakable doors has always annoyed me in video games. Especially when the game seems to revolve around using violence to resolve every problem, why can't I just kick in a door or shoot out a lock.
This is exactly what I was thinking when I read the article summary. We might finally get non-animated 3D movies where most of the field of view can be in focus at the same time. 3D movies give my Wife headaches because her eyes are always trying to focus on the wrong things when they pass in front of the camera.
That isn't actually the end goal for Tesla, that is simply how they started the business. The luxury/sport market has more of a profit buffer and is more willing to disregard price. So they start by producing an exotic and expensive sports car, the Roadster. Building on the design work and technology as well as publicity of the Roadster they developed the Model S. The Roadster was a very limited production run, the Model S has already far out striped it in sales numbers. The next two planned models are an SUV class vehicle, the Model X, and then eventually a mid size sedan, which I can't remember the name for. With each model they aim to sell at a lower price but in higher volume. As time and technology marches on the costs come down and the potential performance goes up, eventually leading to a more economically competitive electric car.
Wood was also probably traditionally chopped in the winter time because during the warmer months there was too much other work that had to be accomplished right away.
I would tend to agree that $2B is probably not enough to protect the entire country at a large enough scale to matter. That said most electronic crap wouldn't be affected for a couple reasons.
First the energy that an EMP can relay to an electronic device is proportional to the size of that device's antenna. So your watch, laptop, cell phone, cars and anything else that isn't plugged in directly to the grid will be just fine. All the stuff in your house can be protect by installing a large surge protector at the point that power enters the house, with similiar devices for things like cable and phone lines, the cost of which would probably be around $1,000 per house.
Second, shielding like the metal body panels of your car will add another layer of protection for a lot of things. Metal roofing and walls will shield stuff pretty effectively. Most military facilities that are critical to defense are already hardened to withstand nuclear attack and so should have plenty of shielding from an EMP.
The grid is really the thing most vulnerable to an EMP. We could protect it by installing surge protectors in the lines connecting to vulnerable bits as well as just interspersed along really long stretches of wire so that nothing to large can build up. The second step in my opinion would be to install surge protectors on each home, this is where the cost would really balloon. I don't know for fact but I would expect that large commercial facilities like hospitals and fuel refineries are already protected from this kind of event by virture of being prepared for lightning strikes on nearby utility poles.
I watched some interesting videos a while back that really helped me understand why spears were such a common weapon in ancient warfare. I had always thought it was just because they were incredibly cheap and fast to produce relative to a sword. But watching sparring sessions between swordsmen vs. a short spear was very eye opening. The guy with the sword really couldn't get in a hit without being forcefully jabbed while still attempting his attack.
I don't know that electricity would really be all that rare in a post apocalyptic setting. Building a generator, or adapting an existing motor, isn't really that difficult and there are bound to be enough electrical engineers around to establish small localized setups.
What I could see being a problem would be lack of refined fuel for running modern farm equipment. However most farm equipment runs on diesel fuels. Building a biodigestor is also not that technically challenging. And while a biodigestor runs best on high starch materials you can use grass cuttings if need be just with lower fuel output. I don't think we could keep farming the way we do now but we could revert to the methods used 30 or 40 years ago pretty readily. That would mean producing less food per farmer, but in a post apocalyptic scenario there would probably be a lot less mouths to feed.
Gunpowder could be a big problem for any warlord that doesn't have far reaching avenues of trade. The Charcoal and Potassium Nitrate should be relatively easy to get into production. But obtaining elemental sulfur would be a big problem. Sulfur can still be found in natural deposits but they are usually clustered around areas of volcanic activity. Most of the worlds sulfur is now produced as a by product of petroleum product processing. You can of course make far more modern propellants but they require significantly more complicated production and materials that I'm not sure would be any more practical.
I think the big problem with something like that would be two fold. It would have to be mammoth in size, not just huge. That is becausethe impactor would have to receive all of it's velocity before release, instead of like an ICBM that throttles up once it is in the much thinner upper atmosphere. Missiles don't throttle up until they are at significant altitude because the forces of friction would destroy them at lower altitudes. A rail gun munition would have to be big enough that it could have an effective amount of mass left after literally burning it's way through the lower atmosphere.
The other problem is how do you aim such a thing? Your loop is already going to be absurdly large so that you can gradually alter the path of the projectile to keep it going in a circle. Any point at which there is a relatively sudden change in direction is going to have to be massively reinforced and I really don't even know how you'd achieve altering the projectiles direction at these speeds without it just ripping through the sidewalls. The rail gun in the article shoots at around 5000mph, which comes out to a relatively puny 1.38 miles per second. Ballistic missles need to be going about 2.5 mi/s when they are at low earth orbit altitudes on the way up, so it'll need to be going faster than that when it leaves the launch facility. Can you imagine what it would take to change the course of what would probably have to be a multi ton projectile hurtling through a tube at speeds significantly above 2.5 mi/s? We'd probably need a "barrel" many miles long.
What might be more possible would be a launch facility with several independant guns which can shoot in say 8 differing directions. Then use a projectile that is capable of guiding it's own course, probably using solid fuels, once it has been launched.
I likely takes a lot more electricity than that because the rail gun isn't going to be very energy efficient. I think I saw a large bank of capacitors in the background of the indoor photo. You wouldn't need such large capacitors, or so many of them, if it was only using 7.2kWh. Also the railgun is also firing a sabot of some sort that contains the 23 pound projectile. Regardless the article already pointed out that it is far cheaper to shoot than the chemically propelled shells. What I really want to see though is impact testing, I want to see things disintegrating explosively as a result of being hit by this thing.
I seem to remember reading that the Boeing 747 has a glide ratio of 1:17. Meaning it can get 17 feet of forward motion for every foot of altitude. Honestly that kind of amazes me.
Slashdot Mirror
The demonstration I participated in years ago was a bit different, or at least I think it was as details are lacking here.
We did a demonstration where one person, A, with a training firearm stood in place. They were told that if the other participant made a move toward them they were to draw and say "bang" as rapidly as possible. The other participant ,B , was standing 22 feet away with a concealed training knife. The only case in which A was able to draw and say bang before B had poked them with the knife was when they started with their hand grasping the firearm. Keep in mind that A was planning to shoot B the entire time and was just waiting to do it until B moved. That isn't a very realistic situation because in real life A frequently will not know if B poses a threat and will not have time to make that kind of fight or flight evaluation before being killed.
Things only get worse the less distance you have. I saw a program once where they were discussing and demonstrating the speed of a practiced disarm. It boiled down to a trained individual being able to deflect and disarm an oponent faster than could be possibly defended because of the time it takes to recognize an opponents action and then send the nerve signals to counter it. Basically whoever decides to take definitive action first has a huge edge.
Not all safeties are like what you imagine. Most Glock models have several safeties but they are all of the variety that prevent accidental discharge when the gun is dropped or something. There are no safeties that I am aware of for Glocks that prevent the gun from firing if you pull the trigger.
It is the Militia that is referred to as being "well regulated" not the gun ownership rights. Current federal law defines the militia of the US as being all able bodied Males between the ages of 17 and 45, and Female citizens who are members of the National Guard.
For a militia to be useful it needs to have armaments, which are impractical for the government to keep on hand just in case. The solution was and is to allow citizens to keep and maintain their own weaponry. In the event that they are called to active militia duty they then can bring their own weapons until production ramps up to meet supply requirements.
I agree that death threats are unacceptable whether made in person or anonymously over the internet.
Keys, or other locking devices are used in vehicles because they are often left for hours at a time unattended in public places, have a relatively high value, and would be trivial to steal otherwise as they provide their own mode of escape.
Have you ever known a gun owner that left their weapons unattended in public places on a daily basis for hours on end?
I would wager that a number of gun owners took it as a near death threat when they had their names and addresses published by a news paper who even provided an interactive online map of those addresses.
I seem to remember someone talking about a work of fiction where the prosecuting attorney was obligated to share the fate of anyone they got the death penalty for. I could see that working as a means to halt some prosecutorial misconduct but I can certainly imagine circumstances where it wouldn't.
Most of the breeder reactors I've read about have been based on the EBR I and II. In that case they are using a metal, rather than the typical oxide, fuel which means that pyroprocessing can be used instead of the horendously messy aqueous process you are talking about.
The EBR II was demonstrated to be passively safe. That is they performed tests that demonstrated what would happen in a full power loss or circulatory system failure. In all cases the reactor shut down the nuclear reaction safely and without damaging the core. Because these reactors aren't using water as the coolant they can operate at near atmospheric pressures even at very high temperatures. That means that you don't have to worry about the reactor vessel developing a high pressure leak and dumping radioactive crap into the environment. As the temperature climbs from lack of cooling the pressure doesn't rise like it would in a water cooled system. Also the core is designed such that as the temperature rises the fuel cladding expands and shuts down the reaction by increasing the separation between the fuel components.
The only real hazard seems to be with sodium coolant designs where special care has to be taken to not let the sodium come into contact with oxygen or water because that would cause fires. But this is far more simple than the LWR designs because you don't have to work with really high pressure containment in the reactor vessel.
A few interesting projects in this area:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
A modular design for a factory produced 311MWe Reactor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
A relatively small, self contained, transportable, autonomous reactor design. The fuel here wouldn't be reprocessed until the 15-30 year service life was used up. Then the unit would be returned to the manufacturer who would replace the fuel components and refurbish the unit and lease it back out again.
I watched an interesting documentary the other night where they showed live background radiation results from all around the world. The 3 highest spots they showed were Pripayat, Fukushima, and some naturally radioactive beach in Brazil. The really interesting thing to me was that the difference between Pripayat and say NYC wasn't that huge, the background count was around 3 times that of NYC. And people have been living in Pripayat for decades now with little to no measurable side affects. I certainly wouldn't advocate for weaker safety measures but the threat of toxifing huge tracts of land really seems to be overblown.
I urge you to do some reading on modern reactor designs. Remember the Japanese reactor you are pointing to as an example is first of all an ancient design and secondly is a LWR design, which is idiotic to begin with. A good place to start would be reading about the IFR design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Even if you go with LWR cores can and should be designed to shut down entirely on their own in the event of a melt down. There are several ways to do this but my favorite is providing multiple seperate spaces for the melted core to flow to in the event of a meltdown. The core can only sustain it's nuclear reaction so long as their is a critical mass of fissionable material. When the core melts and flows into the seperate sections you end up with several smaller masses of fuel which no longer has the critical mass necessary for nuclear reactions to continue. And that is a mind bogglingly simple safety feature to implement and disaster proof.
The problem is that the commercial industry went with designs based off a quick and dirty design meant for military applications. And it's safety mechanisms were designed mostly to handle risk by redundancy instead of being passively safe.
I am by no means an expert but the wikipedia page seems to only indicate either a rocky asteroid/meteor or worn out chunk of comet as serious possibilities. Given the evidence of magnetite speres, and their composition, in the soil and trees I would lean away from the comet theory myself.
The solar cell problem with efficiency sounds like an issue that might be better addressed by just not using solar cells to directly generate current. How about instead of hoisting heavy PV cells we put up a mirror array built of very thin foil. Arrange the mirrors to direct the light onto a working fluid and generate power using that? The only downside I can think of to that at the moment would be that the mirrors would have to be mechanized to track the sun.
Impactors actually hitting the ground would definitely cause more damage. But air bursts can still be devastating enough. Tunguska was an air burst and it leveled something like 2,000 square Kilometers of forrest. Granted Tunguska was much larger than the asteroids in this report.
I think one of the reasons that Skyrim appeals to so many people is because it models reality in a number of ways that people like. Doors being one of the best examples. I was thinking about it and I simply can't remember any doors that you couldn't open at all. I thought I found one once but it turned out you just had to initiate the Dark Brotherhood quest line to wind up inside that building. And there are a number of other doors that require some questing to enter, but the huge majority of doors can be opened at any point in the game. For games like Thief and Saints Row it would mean a little more development time designing some generic building interiors that you then use for all of those hundreds of unimportant doors to use.
In earlier versions of Minecraft skeletons could actually shoot you through the doors. Although I was never completely sure if that was because they could shoot through the transparent bits of the door or if doors were just bugged. Anyways it meant you had to make sure your front door didn't have a direct line of sight to the main parts of your house/cave. Otherwise you could get sniped in the 'safety' of your own home.
The subject of unbreakable doors has always annoyed me in video games. Especially when the game seems to revolve around using violence to resolve every problem, why can't I just kick in a door or shoot out a lock.
This is exactly what I was thinking when I read the article summary. We might finally get non-animated 3D movies where most of the field of view can be in focus at the same time. 3D movies give my Wife headaches because her eyes are always trying to focus on the wrong things when they pass in front of the camera.
That isn't actually the end goal for Tesla, that is simply how they started the business. The luxury/sport market has more of a profit buffer and is more willing to disregard price. So they start by producing an exotic and expensive sports car, the Roadster. Building on the design work and technology as well as publicity of the Roadster they developed the Model S. The Roadster was a very limited production run, the Model S has already far out striped it in sales numbers. The next two planned models are an SUV class vehicle, the Model X, and then eventually a mid size sedan, which I can't remember the name for. With each model they aim to sell at a lower price but in higher volume. As time and technology marches on the costs come down and the potential performance goes up, eventually leading to a more economically competitive electric car.
Wood was also probably traditionally chopped in the winter time because during the warmer months there was too much other work that had to be accomplished right away.
I would tend to agree that $2B is probably not enough to protect the entire country at a large enough scale to matter. That said most electronic crap wouldn't be affected for a couple reasons.
First the energy that an EMP can relay to an electronic device is proportional to the size of that device's antenna. So your watch, laptop, cell phone, cars and anything else that isn't plugged in directly to the grid will be just fine. All the stuff in your house can be protect by installing a large surge protector at the point that power enters the house, with similiar devices for things like cable and phone lines, the cost of which would probably be around $1,000 per house.
Second, shielding like the metal body panels of your car will add another layer of protection for a lot of things. Metal roofing and walls will shield stuff pretty effectively. Most military facilities that are critical to defense are already hardened to withstand nuclear attack and so should have plenty of shielding from an EMP.
The grid is really the thing most vulnerable to an EMP. We could protect it by installing surge protectors in the lines connecting to vulnerable bits as well as just interspersed along really long stretches of wire so that nothing to large can build up. The second step in my opinion would be to install surge protectors on each home, this is where the cost would really balloon. I don't know for fact but I would expect that large commercial facilities like hospitals and fuel refineries are already protected from this kind of event by virture of being prepared for lightning strikes on nearby utility poles.
I've had some games clock up hours played just downloading the game.
I watched some interesting videos a while back that really helped me understand why spears were such a common weapon in ancient warfare. I had always thought it was just because they were incredibly cheap and fast to produce relative to a sword. But watching sparring sessions between swordsmen vs. a short spear was very eye opening. The guy with the sword really couldn't get in a hit without being forcefully jabbed while still attempting his attack.
I don't know that electricity would really be all that rare in a post apocalyptic setting. Building a generator, or adapting an existing motor, isn't really that difficult and there are bound to be enough electrical engineers around to establish small localized setups.
What I could see being a problem would be lack of refined fuel for running modern farm equipment. However most farm equipment runs on diesel fuels. Building a biodigestor is also not that technically challenging. And while a biodigestor runs best on high starch materials you can use grass cuttings if need be just with lower fuel output. I don't think we could keep farming the way we do now but we could revert to the methods used 30 or 40 years ago pretty readily. That would mean producing less food per farmer, but in a post apocalyptic scenario there would probably be a lot less mouths to feed.
Gunpowder could be a big problem for any warlord that doesn't have far reaching avenues of trade. The Charcoal and Potassium Nitrate should be relatively easy to get into production. But obtaining elemental sulfur would be a big problem. Sulfur can still be found in natural deposits but they are usually clustered around areas of volcanic activity. Most of the worlds sulfur is now produced as a by product of petroleum product processing. You can of course make far more modern propellants but they require significantly more complicated production and materials that I'm not sure would be any more practical.
Which in my opinion is all the more reason to keep alternative "medicine" around.
I think the big problem with something like that would be two fold. It would have to be mammoth in size, not just huge. That is becausethe impactor would have to receive all of it's velocity before release, instead of like an ICBM that throttles up once it is in the much thinner upper atmosphere. Missiles don't throttle up until they are at significant altitude because the forces of friction would destroy them at lower altitudes. A rail gun munition would have to be big enough that it could have an effective amount of mass left after literally burning it's way through the lower atmosphere.
The other problem is how do you aim such a thing? Your loop is already going to be absurdly large so that you can gradually alter the path of the projectile to keep it going in a circle. Any point at which there is a relatively sudden change in direction is going to have to be massively reinforced and I really don't even know how you'd achieve altering the projectiles direction at these speeds without it just ripping through the sidewalls. The rail gun in the article shoots at around 5000mph, which comes out to a relatively puny 1.38 miles per second. Ballistic missles need to be going about 2.5 mi/s when they are at low earth orbit altitudes on the way up, so it'll need to be going faster than that when it leaves the launch facility. Can you imagine what it would take to change the course of what would probably have to be a multi ton projectile hurtling through a tube at speeds significantly above 2.5 mi/s? We'd probably need a "barrel" many miles long.
What might be more possible would be a launch facility with several independant guns which can shoot in say 8 differing directions. Then use a projectile that is capable of guiding it's own course, probably using solid fuels, once it has been launched.
I likely takes a lot more electricity than that because the rail gun isn't going to be very energy efficient. I think I saw a large bank of capacitors in the background of the indoor photo. You wouldn't need such large capacitors, or so many of them, if it was only using 7.2kWh. Also the railgun is also firing a sabot of some sort that contains the 23 pound projectile. Regardless the article already pointed out that it is far cheaper to shoot than the chemically propelled shells. What I really want to see though is impact testing, I want to see things disintegrating explosively as a result of being hit by this thing.
I seem to remember reading that the Boeing 747 has a glide ratio of 1:17. Meaning it can get 17 feet of forward motion for every foot of altitude. Honestly that kind of amazes me.