OnTheIssues says the following about Obama's gun control position which is a lot more then just keeping firearms from criminals:
Ban the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons. Increase state restrictions on the purchase and possession of firearms. Require manufacturers to provide child-safety locks with firearms.
I do not disagree that the design using epoxy resin to anchor the ceiling support bolts into place could work well but it requires a high level of quality control and ongoing periodic inspection. To compound the installation mistakes, inspections that gave warning of failure do to plastic deformation were ignored. I try to avoid using non-captive joints where safety could be impaired.
If there is a way to make a reasonably uniform and flat spectrum from fluorescent light (and eliminate the flicker with what is either DC or 25..40 kHz), then maybe we have a solution. I was looking at building a light made from 22 different narrow band LEDs and see if that would be close enough to flat.
A good electronic ballast will have essentially zero flicker but this does depend on the design. Using DC does work but will yield uneven lamp illumination and much shorter life. As I posted, I found that using a warm white and cool white tube in each fixture gave better results then using either alone. LEDs are very narrowband and balancing their outputs against each other would be quite a task.
Using zener regulation in series mode works for low power devices but become problematical at anything above a couple of watts. Low power switching supplies encompass power levels up to about 25 watts and can handle inputs up to about 30 volts without undo complication except for corner cases. Above that, discrete power switches and inductive impedance matching has to be done which makes things more complicated.
The high voltage DC distribution standard being discussed for data centers is 380 volts DC which still requires the equivalent of the current 120/240 volt AC power supplies currently in use. While it is possible to build a point of load regulator to accept this type of input severe compromises would have to be made.
The advantage in EVE is that it's wide-open PVP. (I've played both EQ, EQ2 and Eve.) So, if someone ticks you off, you can go hunting for them, or wardec their corporation, or hire mercenaries to hunt them down or make life difficult for them. There are ways to retaliate against griefers and idiots.
I did not post about it but as you have identified one of SOE's problems in EQ was that their "Play Nice" policies were enforced in such a way that they really only applied to those who followed them and became disadvantaged as a result. Some of this was caused by the nature of the policies themselves and some by inconsistent SOE enforcement. The PvE servers really were PvP in all but name. The current solution to these problems seems to be to remove the Massively Multiplayer aspects of the games by limiting player interaction to something not much more engaging then real time chat.
One odd thing I have found in modern MMORPGs is that none of the ones I am aware of, Eve possibly excepted, learned the lessons of their antecedents. Lucasfilm's Habitat specifically comes to mind since a lot has been published on the culture that developed within it and how various issues were handled. George Santayana's statement, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," takes on real meaning when one observes it so plainly over such a short time scale.
My back of the envelope calculation shows that a rectifier for a 25 watt ballast would need about 70 microfarads of capacitance for 10% ripple which the ballast could easily remove even when dimming. One bridge rectifier and one capacitor should add less then $3 to the cost. Compatibility with standard phase control dimmers would not add much more to this. As you point out though the ballasts are made as cheap as possible and it is not always easy to tell the well designed ones from the poor ones.
I actually prefer tube fluorescent lighting to incandescent but that is because the large surface area and linear length serve to minimize shadows. Using a combination of separate warm and cool phosphors mounted in the same fixture helps with color.
My Everquest days are well into the past but my view from the bottom to middle level of the raiding guilds showed routine behavior that would normally only be associated with the worst that one could expect of humanity. To be fair, the server I was on was particularly bad but were I to personally suffer from the behaviors I saw in game in the real world, I would face the serious temptation to retaliate in ways best left to the imagination. I suspected and later verified that each server developed a unique culture over time and I suspect there is much to be gained by utilizing the differences to create an entirely new dimension for online play. The only thing that surprises me is that the in game betrayals never escalated to a deadly level in the real world but my own vindictive nature no doubt colors my perspective.
What I hear of Eve actually seems tame compared to what I experienced in Everquest but besides the differences in game design there are specific differences between the policies of SOE and CCP Games that probably explain this. I suspect future game designers could put a cultural anthropologist and psychologist to good use.
If the FBI has a tap on your neighbor's phone, they can't tap your phone and listen to your conversations too just because they happen to be in the neighborhood.
But if your neighbor's phone was multiplexed with yours in such a way that it was not possible to tap one without tapping the other they would be permitted to tap both. If it is not possible for them to monitor the specific IP without monitoring an entire subnet (which seems odd to me unless the tap was on something other then ethernet) then they court may allow the later. Encryption like arms should be a great equalizer here.
One thing I have not seen mentioned here is that there are limits to how they may search an area. If they have a road block setup to search vehicles for a fugitive, they may not indiscriminately search containers like glove boxes coolers that are plainly too small to hold the fugitive. Such searches unless justified outside of the search warrant would be invalid.
This is likely apocryphal but I remember reading about a message from the Afghanistan resistance to CIA during their war with the Soviets that went something like this:
"Stop sending surface to air missiles. Send surface to aircraft missiles."
Why multiple exposures? Why so sloppy? Why use so much? They could have used a *much*, *much*, *much* smaller amount and still have made the same statement. Why was there so much of the stuff all around, but only a small amount (by a large measure) made it into the target of the assassination? It just doesn't add up. It seems like these guys were up to something else.
If some organization has been using Polonium routinely for untraceable executions this could simply have been the first time a mistake was made such that the method was identified.
To be fair, the environment that a car battery lives in is a lot less benign then a laptop. Between the temperature extremes, vibration, shock, and power demands they work remarkably well. Wet cell NiCd and maybe NiFe batteries would work even better but cost more in materials. The newer polymer lithium ion batteries that are used in power tools might work as well but again are more expensive.
Actually it travels around 18.7 meters in that 16GHz period. It'd travel just under 2 cm for a 16 THz chip.
Just off the top of my head 2 meters is about 146 MHz in free space so I believe you are off by a factor of 10^3. Dusting off my HP48 shows that 16 GHz has a wavelength of about 18.7 millimeters. I am used to doing these calculations based on wavelength for RF design but using period gives the same results. 16 GHz is 62.5 picoseconds which again yields 18.7 millimeters at the speed of light.
SiO2 has a dielectric constant of 3.9 for a 0.5 velocity of propagation and SiOC is about 2.7 for a 0.61 VoP so the actual distance is about 10 millimeters. IC designers have been dealing with propagation delays that are greater then the cycles times for a while now.
Wasn't there a painted around the turn of the century that did something similar though? I can't remember the name of the artist sadly.
This may not be what you are thinking of but I remember a series of painting that mysteriously displayed photograph like perspective that later were determined to have been made using the equivalent of a pinhole camera. The artist traced the outline of the scene while inside the darkroom on the canvas which was illuminated with the pinhole image.
On second thought, you were probably thinking of Georges Seurat's use of pointillism of which Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte may be the most famous:
This is likely enough. The subject has been on my mind recently do to a similar discussion over at www.realworldtech.com.
I was explaining that the much lower capacity means that this drive probably doesn't have higher data density than a 3.5" drive, so it won't (necessarily) have higher throughput.
Something which I considered adding in my post was that if the drive's internal data rate is limited by the read channel electronics (there was another post here about this) then it should not be significantly different from lower speed drives. The linear bit density would be lower of course. Before the use of magneto resistive heads this was not necessarily the case since increased linear bit density also translated into a larger signal.
I wonder if there is a significant difference in the zoning between 7200 RPM and 15000 RPM drives giving the later more consistent sustained transfer rates.
I have a few small VPN routers myself for just these sorts of applications. I suspect it is not the price of an adequate VPN router but the inconvenience and addition time needed to make such a solution work.
In this case, they've got many times lower capacity than even their 10k RPM 2.5" HDD, never mind their 3.5" HDDs.
One of the applications for these drives are systems that are performance limited by access time and not capacity that can not yet use solid state storage. In a lot of very large storage installations, the existing arrays are already capacity underutilized because excess spindles and actuators have to be added to lower the average access time for multiple requests. It is not uncommon to not even utilize the inner area of 3.5 inch drives because the extra capacity is not needed and doing so marginally lowers the access time for systems where this is of primary importance.
Personally, I'll wait for 3.5" HDDs with dual servos instead (basically, internal RAID), which will completely smoke this, and everything else out there.
Dual actuator drives would indeed help significantly and it has been tried however the price premium over using twice as many standard drives would seem to make it too expensive. I suspect solid state storage will become cost effective before multiple actuator drives do.
An example of this would be concrete has a high compressive strength rating (can absorb high compressive/crushing forces) but has quite poor tensile strength (twisting or bending) and will crack or spall. Conversely, steel has a high tensile strength (resistent to twisting/bending) but is comparitively easily deformed by crushing forces.
I am pretty sure the difference in tensile and compressive strength you studied for steel is because of how it is used compared to concrete. Thin walled tubes and surfaces fail do to buckling before compressive strength becomes an issue. Concrete would fail in tension on the opposite side before buckling would be apparent.
Bendy is probably as good a non technical term for it as any but it is naturally more complicated then that. Concrete like all stone is weak in tension and strong in compression. Reinforced concrete is of course much better because the steel prevents unhindered expansion. Best of all is prestressed concrete which has cables or rods under tension embedded in it placing all of the surfaces in compression up to some limit. A couple years ago I noticed prestressed concrete foundations used in new California single family housing making me wonder how many foundations had actually failed.
Tempered glass is similar in that it is manufactured in such a way that the inside is in tension but protected from fracture by the surface which is held in compression. Once a crack reaches the inside, the glass tends to release all the stored strain energy yielding the spectacular failure some may be familiar with. Trees work in the opposite way since the strength of wood is reversed from stone or glass. The inside is in compression and stretches the skin into tension. This is especially important since the failure mode in bending of a tree is usually buckling at the surface which happens at a lower strain then the compression strength of wood would indicate.
Very uncommon now, because we need to attract women, and despite the fact that my grandma can shoot a.308, it seems its politically incorrect in today's army to have deadly weapons used by the masses of soldiers.
I will have to remember this one along with a certain author referring to his M16 as his girlfriend gun although I may be mistaken on the caliber. It could have been a 10/22 with a machine gun trigger group. It is time to reread that book.
I agree that Garand sure did design a fine weapon. I have managed to survive without ever having experienced M1 Thumb which makes me wonder if I missed out on an experience.
Is his point about being prepared for the unexpected and the fog of war valid or not?
I might have thought the same thing but he used the term Assault Rifle instead of Assault Weapon which is what I would have expected of Senator Diane Feinstein. Actually, I should not expect any sort of consistency from her on the subject since obfuscation works in her favor.
Unfortunately, testable examples of this technology are not available yet while Lithium Ion is in production now. Existing double layer gold and carbon super capacitors despite being miraculous charge storage devices are in no way close to the energy densities of batteries.
2) Panasonic's NiCD batteries are rated at 1.25 volts, which helps.
3) Alkaline batteries offer lower voltages over time, as they become drained, so just about everything has to be able to operate on 1.2V anyhow, otherwise it will have horendous battery life. NiCD batteries, unlike Alkalines, will hold their 1.2V until they're almost completely drained. That works great in most modern devices, but is considered a drawback in flashlights because you get no warning.
4) But more than that. Modern Ni-MH batteries, though rated at 1.2V, really offer 1.5V (in my own tests) when freshly charged, and slowly go down, like Alkalines.
Terminal voltage depends on chemistry and while Panasonic may print 1.25 volts on their cells they use the same chemistry and produce the same voltage as other similar cells. One advantage to the spiral wound construction of NiCd and NiMH cells is the large surface area yields a very low internal resistance and high power density. Primary alkaline batteries lack this and suffer at high discharge rates although they themselves are much better then the dry cells they replaced. The discharge curve for NiCd and NiMH is actually so flat around 1.2 volts that it is not trivial to measure it accurately during charge and discharge.
Incidentally, I have successfully used a 10 D cell NiCd battery belt I originally constructed for high power drain applications to start cars in place of the standard lead acid battery which it easily exceeded in performance although not in capacity. I would love to use something like it on a permanent basis but reverse engineering car charging systems for modification is getting more difficult to do.
1) "High capacity" AA NiCDs from Radioshack (850mAH?) have just slightly less power than Alkalines, and have been sold for at least a decade now.
2) High Capacity AA Panasonic NiCDs (1100mAH) last as long or longer than Alkalines, DESPITE the lower voltage of NiCD.
3) NiMH AA batteries, as sold by Energizer and Duracell (2000+ mAH), last nearly TWICE as long as disposible Alkaline batteries.
The early standard AA sizes for NiCd, NiMH, and Alkaline cells were about 500 mAH, 1000 mAH, and 2000 mAH. For D cells this was 4 AH, 7 AH, and 14 AH. Since then rechargeable batteries have improved by about a factor of 2 so ignoring power density issues, NiMH has caught up to Alkaline and NiCd is about where NiMH used to be.
Rechargeables lose energy if not kept in the charger.
1) True for NiCD, but absolutely not true for NiMH. NiMH batteries will hold their charge for months.
NiCd really should have a lower self discharge then NiMH but the construction used to create higher energy density in these types of cells naturally leads to a higher self discharge and shorter life. In theory the lower capacity cells of a given chemistry should have a longer life span and a lower self discharge rate but within a given construction design I have not been able to measure a difference and consumer batteries are optimized for capacity at the expense of everything else including reliability.
I have some sintered NiCd cells approaching 50 years old that work as well as when they were new. Their failure mode at this point is case fracture when dropped. Of course, their energy and power density are relatively low by modern standards and they are not maintenance free.
2) I haven't seen an always-on charger in well over a decade. So your experience is obviously very out-of-date, and not remotely applicable or helpful.
3) Recent batteries and chargers have gotten charge time down to 30 minutes, so unless you are in a situation desperately need a battery R
4) Leaving NiCD batteries constantly charging will significantly reduces their lifespan. That may have been causing some of the other issues you listed.
Even now a lot of chargers really do not do an adequate job and
Slashdot Mirror
OnTheIssues says the following about Obama's gun control position which is a lot more then just keeping firearms from criminals:
G un_Control.htm
Ban the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons.
Increase state restrictions on the purchase and possession of firearms.
Require manufacturers to provide child-safety locks with firearms.
http://www.ontheissues.org/Domestic/Barack_Obama_
I do not disagree that the design using epoxy resin to anchor the ceiling support bolts into place could work well but it requires a high level of quality control and ongoing periodic inspection. To compound the installation mistakes, inspections that gave warning of failure do to plastic deformation were ignored. I try to avoid using non-captive joints where safety could be impaired.
Do you have any spectrum graphs of the different phosphors?
The various fluorescent tube phosphor spectrum are available online but the Wikipedia article is a good starting point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_lamp
If there is a way to make a reasonably uniform and flat spectrum from fluorescent light (and eliminate the flicker with what is either DC or 25..40 kHz), then maybe we have a solution. I was looking at building a light made from 22 different narrow band LEDs and see if that would be close enough to flat.
A good electronic ballast will have essentially zero flicker but this does depend on the design. Using DC does work but will yield uneven lamp illumination and much shorter life. As I posted, I found that using a warm white and cool white tube in each fixture gave better results then using either alone. LEDs are very narrowband and balancing their outputs against each other would be quite a task.
How does one "weigh" a planet or star? Where do you put the scale?
Just borrow Archimedes' Lever.
Using zener regulation in series mode works for low power devices but become problematical at anything above a couple of watts. Low power switching supplies encompass power levels up to about 25 watts and can handle inputs up to about 30 volts without undo complication except for corner cases. Above that, discrete power switches and inductive impedance matching has to be done which makes things more complicated.
The high voltage DC distribution standard being discussed for data centers is 380 volts DC which still requires the equivalent of the current 120/240 volt AC power supplies currently in use. While it is possible to build a point of load regulator to accept this type of input severe compromises would have to be made.
The advantage in EVE is that it's wide-open PVP. (I've played both EQ, EQ2 and Eve.) So, if someone ticks you off, you can go hunting for them, or wardec their corporation, or hire mercenaries to hunt them down or make life difficult for them. There are ways to retaliate against griefers and idiots.
I did not post about it but as you have identified one of SOE's problems in EQ was that their "Play Nice" policies were enforced in such a way that they really only applied to those who followed them and became disadvantaged as a result. Some of this was caused by the nature of the policies themselves and some by inconsistent SOE enforcement. The PvE servers really were PvP in all but name. The current solution to these problems seems to be to remove the Massively Multiplayer aspects of the games by limiting player interaction to something not much more engaging then real time chat.
One odd thing I have found in modern MMORPGs is that none of the ones I am aware of, Eve possibly excepted, learned the lessons of their antecedents. Lucasfilm's Habitat specifically comes to mind since a lot has been published on the culture that developed within it and how various issues were handled. George Santayana's statement, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," takes on real meaning when one observes it so plainly over such a short time scale.
My back of the envelope calculation shows that a rectifier for a 25 watt ballast would need about 70 microfarads of capacitance for 10% ripple which the ballast could easily remove even when dimming. One bridge rectifier and one capacitor should add less then $3 to the cost. Compatibility with standard phase control dimmers would not add much more to this. As you point out though the ballasts are made as cheap as possible and it is not always easy to tell the well designed ones from the poor ones.
I actually prefer tube fluorescent lighting to incandescent but that is because the large surface area and linear length serve to minimize shadows. Using a combination of separate warm and cool phosphors mounted in the same fixture helps with color.
My Everquest days are well into the past but my view from the bottom to middle level of the raiding guilds showed routine behavior that would normally only be associated with the worst that one could expect of humanity. To be fair, the server I was on was particularly bad but were I to personally suffer from the behaviors I saw in game in the real world, I would face the serious temptation to retaliate in ways best left to the imagination. I suspected and later verified that each server developed a unique culture over time and I suspect there is much to be gained by utilizing the differences to create an entirely new dimension for online play. The only thing that surprises me is that the in game betrayals never escalated to a deadly level in the real world but my own vindictive nature no doubt colors my perspective.
What I hear of Eve actually seems tame compared to what I experienced in Everquest but besides the differences in game design there are specific differences between the policies of SOE and CCP Games that probably explain this. I suspect future game designers could put a cultural anthropologist and psychologist to good use.
Maybe you could rebuke his argument with a technical analysis of your own instead of executing an attack on his character?
If the FBI has a tap on your neighbor's phone, they can't tap your phone and listen to your conversations too just because they happen to be in the neighborhood.
But if your neighbor's phone was multiplexed with yours in such a way that it was not possible to tap one without tapping the other they would be permitted to tap both. If it is not possible for them to monitor the specific IP without monitoring an entire subnet (which seems odd to me unless the tap was on something other then ethernet) then they court may allow the later. Encryption like arms should be a great equalizer here.
One thing I have not seen mentioned here is that there are limits to how they may search an area. If they have a road block setup to search vehicles for a fugitive, they may not indiscriminately search containers like glove boxes coolers that are plainly too small to hold the fugitive. Such searches unless justified outside of the search warrant would be invalid.
This is likely apocryphal but I remember reading about a message from the Afghanistan resistance to CIA during their war with the Soviets that went something like this:
"Stop sending surface to air missiles. Send surface to aircraft missiles."
Why multiple exposures? Why so sloppy? Why use so much? They could have used a *much*, *much*, *much* smaller amount and still have made the same statement. Why was there so much of the stuff all around, but only a small amount (by a large measure) made it into the target of the assassination? It just doesn't add up. It seems like these guys were up to something else.
If some organization has been using Polonium routinely for untraceable executions this could simply have been the first time a mistake was made such that the method was identified.
To be fair, the environment that a car battery lives in is a lot less benign then a laptop. Between the temperature extremes, vibration, shock, and power demands they work remarkably well. Wet cell NiCd and maybe NiFe batteries would work even better but cost more in materials. The newer polymer lithium ion batteries that are used in power tools might work as well but again are more expensive.
Actually it travels around 18.7 meters in that 16GHz period. It'd travel just under 2 cm for a 16 THz chip.
Just off the top of my head 2 meters is about 146 MHz in free space so I believe you are off by a factor of 10^3. Dusting off my HP48 shows that 16 GHz has a wavelength of about 18.7 millimeters. I am used to doing these calculations based on wavelength for RF design but using period gives the same results. 16 GHz is 62.5 picoseconds which again yields 18.7 millimeters at the speed of light.
SiO2 has a dielectric constant of 3.9 for a 0.5 velocity of propagation and SiOC is about 2.7 for a 0.61 VoP so the actual distance is about 10 millimeters. IC designers have been dealing with propagation delays that are greater then the cycles times for a while now.
"We have top men working on it now."
"Who?"
"Top... men."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082971/quotes
Wasn't there a painted around the turn of the century that did something similar though? I can't remember the name of the artist sadly.
t he_Island_of_La_Grande_Jatte
e 30dyvq4.jpg
This may not be what you are thinking of but I remember a series of painting that mysteriously displayed photograph like perspective that later were determined to have been made using the equivalent of a pinhole camera. The artist traced the outline of the scene while inside the darkroom on the canvas which was illuminated with the pinhole image.
On second thought, you were probably thinking of Georges Seurat's use of pointillism of which Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte may be the most famous:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Afternoon_on_
Being the inveterate geek, I prefer this version myself:
http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/5358/alienjatt
I think you missed the context, here.
This is likely enough. The subject has been on my mind recently do to a similar discussion over at www.realworldtech.com.
I was explaining that the much lower capacity means that this drive probably doesn't have higher data density than a 3.5" drive, so it won't (necessarily) have higher throughput.
Something which I considered adding in my post was that if the drive's internal data rate is limited by the read channel electronics (there was another post here about this) then it should not be significantly different from lower speed drives. The linear bit density would be lower of course. Before the use of magneto resistive heads this was not necessarily the case since increased linear bit density also translated into a larger signal.
I wonder if there is a significant difference in the zoning between 7200 RPM and 15000 RPM drives giving the later more consistent sustained transfer rates.
I have a few small VPN routers myself for just these sorts of applications. I suspect it is not the price of an adequate VPN router but the inconvenience and addition time needed to make such a solution work.
In this case, they've got many times lower capacity than even their 10k RPM 2.5" HDD, never mind their 3.5" HDDs.
One of the applications for these drives are systems that are performance limited by access time and not capacity that can not yet use solid state storage. In a lot of very large storage installations, the existing arrays are already capacity underutilized because excess spindles and actuators have to be added to lower the average access time for multiple requests. It is not uncommon to not even utilize the inner area of 3.5 inch drives because the extra capacity is not needed and doing so marginally lowers the access time for systems where this is of primary importance.
Personally, I'll wait for 3.5" HDDs with dual servos instead (basically, internal RAID), which will completely smoke this, and everything else out there.
Dual actuator drives would indeed help significantly and it has been tried however the price premium over using twice as many standard drives would seem to make it too expensive. I suspect solid state storage will become cost effective before multiple actuator drives do.
An example of this would be concrete has a high compressive strength rating (can absorb high compressive/crushing forces) but has quite poor tensile strength (twisting or bending) and will crack or spall. Conversely, steel has a high tensile strength (resistent to twisting/bending) but is comparitively easily deformed by crushing forces.
I am pretty sure the difference in tensile and compressive strength you studied for steel is because of how it is used compared to concrete. Thin walled tubes and surfaces fail do to buckling before compressive strength becomes an issue. Concrete would fail in tension on the opposite side before buckling would be apparent.
Bendy is probably as good a non technical term for it as any but it is naturally more complicated then that. Concrete like all stone is weak in tension and strong in compression. Reinforced concrete is of course much better because the steel prevents unhindered expansion. Best of all is prestressed concrete which has cables or rods under tension embedded in it placing all of the surfaces in compression up to some limit. A couple years ago I noticed prestressed concrete foundations used in new California single family housing making me wonder how many foundations had actually failed.
Tempered glass is similar in that it is manufactured in such a way that the inside is in tension but protected from fracture by the surface which is held in compression. Once a crack reaches the inside, the glass tends to release all the stored strain energy yielding the spectacular failure some may be familiar with. Trees work in the opposite way since the strength of wood is reversed from stone or glass. The inside is in compression and stretches the skin into tension. This is especially important since the failure mode in bending of a tree is usually buckling at the surface which happens at a lower strain then the compression strength of wood would indicate.
Very uncommon now, because we need to attract women, and despite the fact that my grandma can shoot a .308, it seems its politically incorrect in today's army to have deadly weapons used by the masses of soldiers.
I will have to remember this one along with a certain author referring to his M16 as his girlfriend gun although I may be mistaken on the caliber. It could have been a 10/22 with a machine gun trigger group. It is time to reread that book.
I agree that Garand sure did design a fine weapon. I have managed to survive without ever having experienced M1 Thumb which makes me wonder if I missed out on an experience.
Is his point about being prepared for the unexpected and the fog of war valid or not?
I might have thought the same thing but he used the term Assault Rifle instead of Assault Weapon which is what I would have expected of Senator Diane Feinstein. Actually, I should not expect any sort of consistency from her on the subject since obfuscation works in her favor.
Unfortunately, testable examples of this technology are not available yet while Lithium Ion is in production now. Existing double layer gold and carbon super capacitors despite being miraculous charge storage devices are in no way close to the energy densities of batteries.
Terminal voltage depends on chemistry and while Panasonic may print 1.25 volts on their cells they use the same chemistry and produce the same voltage as other similar cells. One advantage to the spiral wound construction of NiCd and NiMH cells is the large surface area yields a very low internal resistance and high power density. Primary alkaline batteries lack this and suffer at high discharge rates although they themselves are much better then the dry cells they replaced. The discharge curve for NiCd and NiMH is actually so flat around 1.2 volts that it is not trivial to measure it accurately during charge and discharge.
Incidentally, I have successfully used a 10 D cell NiCd battery belt I originally constructed for high power drain applications to start cars in place of the standard lead acid battery which it easily exceeded in performance although not in capacity. I would love to use something like it on a permanent basis but reverse engineering car charging systems for modification is getting more difficult to do.
The early standard AA sizes for NiCd, NiMH, and Alkaline cells were about 500 mAH, 1000 mAH, and 2000 mAH. For D cells this was 4 AH, 7 AH, and 14 AH. Since then rechargeable batteries have improved by about a factor of 2 so ignoring power density issues, NiMH has caught up to Alkaline and NiCd is about where NiMH used to be.
NiCd really should have a lower self discharge then NiMH but the construction used to create higher energy density in these types of cells naturally leads to a higher self discharge and shorter life. In theory the lower capacity cells of a given chemistry should have a longer life span and a lower self discharge rate but within a given construction design I have not been able to measure a difference and consumer batteries are optimized for capacity at the expense of everything else including reliability.
I have some sintered NiCd cells approaching 50 years old that work as well as when they were new. Their failure mode at this point is case fracture when dropped. Of course, their energy and power density are relatively low by modern standards and they are not maintenance free.
Even now a lot of chargers really do not do an adequate job and