50% of the beam into 4m disc... may be enough to damage solar cells or overheat the craft if you could sustain it for a while. But most spacecraft are not 4m across but are long and spindly (due to the problems of packing spacecraft into cylindrical rockets). The US military may be trying to develop such systems, but they're going to be difficult to develop. And not particularly efficient, which is always going to be a problem for high power devices (the wasted energy as to go somewhere, and it's is probably a good idea to try to get all that energy away from the guts of your fairly expensive power projection device). Couple that with the laws of optics and you're still looking at systems that struggle to fit into a large aircraft. Putting anti-satellite technology onto aircraft to get above as much pesky atmosphere as possible is obviously sensible.
NASA have a converted 747 (wide-body) carrying the SOFIA AO telescope. Meanwhile the US military (I forget Navy, Air Force or Army) have a separate 747-load of equipment which they've publicised not-very successful anti-missile laser technology. If they're anywhere near the state of the art, then there is a long way to go.
Of course, Black Skunk Works have it in a backpack version. I've seen it in computer games, so it must be true. But the Russian version that fits on a truck is one tenth of the cost.
For infrastructure which you need to plan now to deliver in a decade, pretty much "yes". It may be different in your region, but locally we have 70-90% hydrogeneration utilisation, a 57deg north latitude and cloudy climate reducing solar to less than 50% of it's power density in some areas. Some potential for geothermal, but no one has funded that line of development to any significant degree for decades, so for a 10 year time scale, that is out of the window - just the planning application would take decades. Energy efficiency is always available, but that doesn't actually replace power stations with corroding heat exchangers boilers.
Perhaps we should improve our energy security by building an 8000km undersea and overland high-power line (we can order those off the shelf, can't we? - delivery date will be in a fax tomorrow morning) to a mucking great solar power station in the Sahara, then saying to IS-in-the-Mahgreb to "pretty-please not attack this strategic resource of your Western Crusading Oppressors" ; I'm sure that will work.
Seriously, I do see tree-huggers suggesting things like this. Living in the unreal world does their case no good whatsoever.
... There has been a new "strongest ever" hurricane every few years since the 1970s. Which implies one of two things - there were negligible records of hurricane intensity before the 1970s (which is factually incorrect) ; or the mean strength of hurricanes is increasing. So those of us living outside the hurricane belt (by a safe-for-our-lifetimes margin) can look forward to watching a continuing series of "strongest-ever" hurricanes hitting people who do live in hurricane belts.
well, it's a price you pay for living there. If you can't afford to move, you're in deep shit. But that would also mean that you're poor, and therefore beneath the consideration of the politicians of most countries and the corporate interests that choose the political candidates to fund to power. So that's no problem, except for you yourself.
And coal poses more health and climate change dangers than nuclear power.
did you not understand, or disbelieve.
Completely regardless of the your perception of the risks of nuclear power, the hazards and harm of coal mining are substantial even before you factor in the climate change issues.
As a geologist, with a steady line of work using the geological markers of the
to supply carbon for the current major atmospheric carbon excursion (circumspice!), I have no doubts about the reality of those effects, nor of the risks of open cast and deep mining. Nor of the risks of black lung, mercury, arsenic or soot release. Whether those add up to compare to your dread of nuclear is a different question, but they are not trivial risks. If you are going to make a rational choice in this sort of question, you do have to look at the other sides of the question.
Adding GPS to your NTP corporate servers is not difficult.
Adding a window to the server room, or running a GPS antenna cable through the cable trunking to the outside world is likely to be the harder part of the process. PARTICULARLY if you have anything resembling Management Of Change procedures for your physical cabling.
This is assuming that "tenders" here is synonymous with "monies."
I don't know what the word means in your country, but on this side of the Atlantic (Europe), a "tender" is a proposal that a company puts out to invite other companies to bid for a contract. EU law has some strict issues about how all contracts above a certain value should be put out to public tender, with specified levels of advertising, the amount of detail that needs to be made public in the advertising, etc. This is intended to damage monopolies and break cartels, while encouraging the mobility of labour, service and skills.
The major sanction against organisations that don't comply with public tendering rules is that they're not allowed to be awarded EU contracts.
Returning to TFA, the way I read that is that "Evil Intelligence Organisation" sees "Good Security Researcher" apply for contract "X" by company "Y" which is put out to tender, and goes to have a little talk with the management of company "Y" who then refuse to accept the tender from "Good Security Researcher" but instead accept a contract bid from "Tame Security Bullshitter".
so more precisely, U.S is better than Latin America, Asia
Considering the number of kleptocratic abusive fascistic governments which the US has installed and supported in Latin America and Asia over the years, then you can be sure that the US government knows exactly what it wants to bring about at home.
Normally, when saying Europe, it's meant EU states,
So... if (when? who knows?) the UK leaves the European Union, you'll no longer count it a European country?
Wearing my "geologist" hard hat, I can assure you that plate tectonics does not operate that fast.
And of course, Norway has never been part of Europe. Or at least, never part of the EU. It is part of the European Economic Area and of the Schengen "passport-less borders" arrangements, but they're not the same thing.
Worse. Don't understand the problem. when someone has wasted half an hour of their time explaining the problem to you, pick up the phone again (you were shooting aliens, or watching porn) and say "I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understood..." and repeat the second thing they said.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
You're cooperating. but your car needs fuel to get to their site, you can't remember what was happening in the past, and you no longer work with that system, so what the fuck can they do.
Management idiots cost money. Occupying their time this way costs them money and hurts their business.
The test I've always applied to this is "if this were a conversation in the coffee room, and I felt tempted to take the paper next door to the photocopier," then I'd give them a PDF.
I was having a dental X-ray yesterday (required for work) and chatting to the dentist after they came back into the room. I'd recently heard that what probably injured Marie Curie wasn't the extraction of radium, polonium etc, but running a mobile (and poorly shielded) X-ray machine in the front lines of World War One.
I've had this recently on corporate stuff - firefox would refuse to connect to their intranet because of weak DH key lengths (I forget the exact message). The Hell-desk's solution : use IE 7 or 8, as they deployed onto the machine. And they gave me that instruction, in writing, even after I told them that I wouldn't accept responsibility for any subsequent data breaches.
I have always been told that little quakes unload the pressure that creates big quakes.
Which is it?
Any earthquake moves strain from one location in the Earth to another location. Those movements change local stresses. This can go both ways - moving stress away from one location to another on lowering the stresses at the first and raising it at the other.
That said, what measures have been taken to contain a spill caused by some entity storing that much material in one locale?
Bunding. Absolutely standard technique. You already need (and are required by planning regulations as well as common sense) to have significant space between storage tanks, particularly for flammable fluids. Some of that space you use for access roads and fire (water) mains so you can get your firefighting assets to the scene of a leak / fire/ etc. Other parts of that space you use for robust bunding capable of containing more then the full volume of the tank you are bunding. You separate tanks with bunds, so that a fire in one tank or bund doesn't spread to other tanks. Frequently your initial deployment of firefighting assets will be to put cooling water onto surrounding structures to prevent their mechanical failure and release of more fuel.
Go work on an oil rig. when you're out in the middle of the ocean, you may be days away from external firefighting assets, so you have to think how you're going to manage issues for yourself. Rocket science it ain't (but Range Safety Officers at rocket launch sites have to think about similar issues involving tonnes of flammables).
If things really get bad the crew is going to look towards the highest ranking officer that is still standing, which might be the ensign or lieutenant fresh from the academy.
I remember - possibly from a Heinlein SF story - that there was a case on record of 7 levels of command of a ship being taken out in one explosion during an engagement, with command then devolving onto a teenage mishipman as the ranking remaining officer.
I don't know how true that is, but IIRC that Heinlein was a Naval reservist and generally knew his stuff about military history.
it implies a mad scramble to navigate and synchronize clocks by other means.
Why a mad scramble? I'm carrying a LW radio-controlled watch on my wrist at this moment. Just because something is old technology doesn't mean that it stops working or is taken out of service. I don't actually have any need for synchronisation to better than a couple of minutes, but I don't see that tech being taken out of service for a long time.
Unless someone drops a nuke on it. Or a 737. At which point, there are several dozen alternatives.
just the old Navstar satellites which were in polar orbit so didn't provide fixes very often if you were near the equator.
Sorry, but why do you get fewer fixes near the equator? Were the orbits set up with apogee over the poles to provide more "hang time" in polar areas?
I guess such a system would have been optimised for navigating nuclear-loaded bombers to their targets flying over the North Polar regions. It's not as if the system was designed for civilian convenience, after all.
And, building a self-sustaining base on Mars will be easier than on the Moon because Mars has an atmosphere, making pressure issues simpler and giving you some protection against the smaller micrometeorites.
The micrometeorite protection may well be significant. But the pressure difference? Surface pressure on Mars gets as high as 0.9kPa, which is still less than 1% of the Earth's surface pressure.
You'd get far more benefit in terms of reducing pressure loads by recruiting and training Andean silver miners and Nepali Sherpas for your crew instead of sea-level weaklings.
They might be contemplating such scenarios, but they also have to deal with the potential of spoofing and just plain radio jamming. Drowning out the relatively weak signals from the GPS satellites with noise across the appropriate frequency bands. Not exactly a high tech attack.
the amount of usable area available to civilization would multiply for the first time in centuries.
how so? Are you talking about the million-year programme of terraforming Mars into a high-maintenance planet which would be filled with humans in less than 100 years.
Quick reality check - which has more land area : Earth or Mars? Earth, by an area considerably smaller than Antarctica. Which is vastly more hospitable than any area of Mars.
The spread of lasers used for ranging the Moon is many kilometres by the time it gets to the Moon ; proportionately less at GPS altitudes. but still not going to be metal-cutting millimetres across. I think I see where you're trying to go with this, but you're not going to get there by that route.
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NASA have a converted 747 (wide-body) carrying the SOFIA AO telescope. Meanwhile the US military (I forget Navy, Air Force or Army) have a separate 747-load of equipment which they've publicised not-very successful anti-missile laser technology. If they're anywhere near the state of the art, then there is a long way to go.
Of course, Black Skunk Works have it in a backpack version. I've seen it in computer games, so it must be true. But the Russian version that fits on a truck is one tenth of the cost.
Perhaps we should improve our energy security by building an 8000km undersea and overland high-power line (we can order those off the shelf, can't we? - delivery date will be in a fax tomorrow morning) to a mucking great solar power station in the Sahara, then saying to IS-in-the-Mahgreb to "pretty-please not attack this strategic resource of your Western Crusading Oppressors" ; I'm sure that will work.
Seriously, I do see tree-huggers suggesting things like this. Living in the unreal world does their case no good whatsoever.
well, it's a price you pay for living there. If you can't afford to move, you're in deep shit. But that would also mean that you're poor, and therefore beneath the consideration of the politicians of most countries and the corporate interests that choose the political candidates to fund to power. So that's no problem, except for you yourself.
Which part of
did you not understand, or disbelieve.
Completely regardless of the your perception of the risks of nuclear power, the hazards and harm of coal mining are substantial even before you factor in the climate change issues.
As a geologist, with a steady line of work using the geological markers of the
to supply carbon for the current major atmospheric carbon excursion ( circumspice! ), I have no doubts about the reality of those effects, nor of the risks of open cast and deep mining. Nor of the risks of black lung, mercury, arsenic or soot release. Whether those add up to compare to your dread of nuclear is a different question, but they are not trivial risks. If you are going to make a rational choice in this sort of question, you do have to look at the other sides of the question.
My Elite clone stopped working sound-wise last week. Sob. Probably some fucked-up update.
Actually, this may be the first thing I've seen that might make getting an HD TV worth the effort.
As I routinely say to my trainees.
"One measurement is a datum. Two measurements is a disagreement. Three measurements is a majority opinion. Four measurements is statistics."
Adding a window to the server room, or running a GPS antenna cable through the cable trunking to the outside world is likely to be the harder part of the process. PARTICULARLY if you have anything resembling Management Of Change procedures for your physical cabling.
I was about to Google for exactly that. There is this RaspberryPi based solution too : http://www.satsignal.eu/ntp/Ra...
I don't know what the word means in your country, but on this side of the Atlantic (Europe), a "tender" is a proposal that a company puts out to invite other companies to bid for a contract. EU law has some strict issues about how all contracts above a certain value should be put out to public tender, with specified levels of advertising, the amount of detail that needs to be made public in the advertising, etc. This is intended to damage monopolies and break cartels, while encouraging the mobility of labour, service and skills.
The major sanction against organisations that don't comply with public tendering rules is that they're not allowed to be awarded EU contracts.
Returning to TFA, the way I read that is that "Evil Intelligence Organisation" sees "Good Security Researcher" apply for contract "X" by company "Y" which is put out to tender, and goes to have a little talk with the management of company "Y" who then refuse to accept the tender from "Good Security Researcher" but instead accept a contract bid from "Tame Security Bullshitter".
Easy to suspect, hard to prove.
Considering the number of kleptocratic abusive fascistic governments which the US has installed and supported in Latin America and Asia over the years, then you can be sure that the US government knows exactly what it wants to bring about at home.
Practice makes perfect!
So ... if (when? who knows?) the UK leaves the European Union, you'll no longer count it a European country?
Wearing my "geologist" hard hat, I can assure you that plate tectonics does not operate that fast.
And of course, Norway has never been part of Europe. Or at least, never part of the EU. It is part of the European Economic Area and of the Schengen "passport-less borders" arrangements, but they're not the same thing.
OK - and the beams from the satellite were relatively narrow. Or you needed the satellite to be at a particular range of azimuths? Sorry, altitudes.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
You're cooperating. but your car needs fuel to get to their site, you can't remember what was happening in the past, and you no longer work with that system, so what the fuck can they do.
Management idiots cost money. Occupying their time this way costs them money and hurts their business.
Video - not bothered.
Music - no.
Is there anything else?
Sounds like fair use to me.
I was having a dental X-ray yesterday (required for work) and chatting to the dentist after they came back into the room. I'd recently heard that what probably injured Marie Curie wasn't the extraction of radium, polonium etc, but running a mobile (and poorly shielded) X-ray machine in the front lines of World War One.
Their data, their responsibility, their problem.
Any earthquake moves strain from one location in the Earth to another location. Those movements change local stresses. This can go both ways - moving stress away from one location to another on lowering the stresses at the first and raising it at the other.
Bunding. Absolutely standard technique. You already need (and are required by planning regulations as well as common sense) to have significant space between storage tanks, particularly for flammable fluids. Some of that space you use for access roads and fire (water) mains so you can get your firefighting assets to the scene of a leak / fire/ etc. Other parts of that space you use for robust bunding capable of containing more then the full volume of the tank you are bunding. You separate tanks with bunds, so that a fire in one tank or bund doesn't spread to other tanks. Frequently your initial deployment of firefighting assets will be to put cooling water onto surrounding structures to prevent their mechanical failure and release of more fuel.
Go work on an oil rig. when you're out in the middle of the ocean, you may be days away from external firefighting assets, so you have to think how you're going to manage issues for yourself. Rocket science it ain't (but Range Safety Officers at rocket launch sites have to think about similar issues involving tonnes of flammables).
I remember - possibly from a Heinlein SF story - that there was a case on record of 7 levels of command of a ship being taken out in one explosion during an engagement, with command then devolving onto a teenage mishipman as the ranking remaining officer.
I don't know how true that is, but IIRC that Heinlein was a Naval reservist and generally knew his stuff about military history.
Why a mad scramble? I'm carrying a LW radio-controlled watch on my wrist at this moment. Just because something is old technology doesn't mean that it stops working or is taken out of service. I don't actually have any need for synchronisation to better than a couple of minutes, but I don't see that tech being taken out of service for a long time.
Unless someone drops a nuke on it. Or a 737. At which point, there are several dozen alternatives.
Sorry, but why do you get fewer fixes near the equator? Were the orbits set up with apogee over the poles to provide more "hang time" in polar areas? I guess such a system would have been optimised for navigating nuclear-loaded bombers to their targets flying over the North Polar regions. It's not as if the system was designed for civilian convenience, after all.
The micrometeorite protection may well be significant. But the pressure difference? Surface pressure on Mars gets as high as 0.9kPa, which is still less than 1% of the Earth's surface pressure.
You'd get far more benefit in terms of reducing pressure loads by recruiting and training Andean silver miners and Nepali Sherpas for your crew instead of sea-level weaklings.
They might be contemplating such scenarios, but they also have to deal with the potential of spoofing and just plain radio jamming. Drowning out the relatively weak signals from the GPS satellites with noise across the appropriate frequency bands. Not exactly a high tech attack.
how so? Are you talking about the million-year programme of terraforming Mars into a high-maintenance planet which would be filled with humans in less than 100 years.
Quick reality check - which has more land area : Earth or Mars? Earth, by an area considerably smaller than Antarctica. Which is vastly more hospitable than any area of Mars.
The spread of lasers used for ranging the Moon is many kilometres by the time it gets to the Moon ; proportionately less at GPS altitudes. but still not going to be metal-cutting millimetres across. I think I see where you're trying to go with this, but you're not going to get there by that route.