Rail guns fire slugs; they aren't about to put an exploding shell in a rail gun with that much electrical and magnetic energy around.
Then railguns will be of limited use for targets on land. When the trajectory needs to be more ballistic for indirect fire you won't have the speed necessary for kinetic weapons.
Unless the projectile store all its energy in form of momentum instead of explosive To do that, you just need to shoot your projectile at ridiculous speeds.
Kinetic energy projectiles have limitations with respect to indirect fire, to avoid redundancy see an earlier response: http://slashdot.org/comments.p....
Yes they are, an aluminium slug impacting the ground at say Mach 15 does not need any gunpowder to create a large hole in the ground or destroy a building, the kinetic energy of the projectile will do that all by itself.
Only for line of sight type shots and shots with a relatively low ballistic trajectory. For shorter ranged shots with a more ballistic trajectory the launch speed would need to be greatly reduced. Note that if the shot is sufficiently high (perhaps a target on a reverse slope) the projectile is coming down at a gravity induced speed, not at a launch induced speed.
Kinetic energy projectiles do not completely replace explosive warheads.
Laser are line of sight only, they can't do indirect fire. A ship would also need rail guns to launch projectiles. Its an improvement, but there will still be ammunition limits.
They are not eliminating all "gunpowder". They may be able to eliminate the propellant used to launch projectiles but many of those projectiles will still have explosive warheads. Its an improvement, but there will still be armored magazines for such projectiles.
2008. The retraction of Wakefield's fraudulent study and him being stripped of his medical license didn't happen until 2010.
Careful. It sounds like you are saying there is nothing wrong with basing a political position on a single study that goes against the vast scientific consensus.
First off, hepatitis can certainly be spread through non-sexual contact. So that's out the window.
Paul was speaking on CNBC earlier today, transcripts aren't up yet, but he seems to have been specifically using Hepatitis B being given to newborns in a cocktail of a half dozen other vaccines. He mentioned that Hepatitis B is transmitted sexually and through blood transfusions. He mentioned having the various vaccines staggered over time rather than all at once.
In what I think is the same Paul interview you're referring to, he said this, "I've heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children, who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines." So we have a public figure using the media to further perpetuate nonsense that's been scientifically debunked.
Well I was hoping that he was not referring to the Jenny McCarthy autism epidemic nonsense when he said that, and was referring to some legit very rare side effect or allergic reaction or rare drug interaction. Things orders of magnitude less likely than getting the disease being vaccinated against.
In any case the all-in-one cocktails seem like a cost reduction thing. Or a lack of trust that a mother will bring the kid back for followups. I recall seeing in my immunization records that my mother brought me in for a series of vaccinations over a period of months. Sounds like Paul is advocating such an approach.
Don't freak out at the phrase "vaccine choice". The speaker may not mean what you assume.
Rand Paul said something similar in a TV interview today. The interviewer was shocked and Rand Paul explained that "vaccine choice" does not inherently mean some science denier who does not believe in medicine. What Paul, and probably Christie, mean is that parents can reasonably delay some vaccines. Paul mentioned that children sometimes receive a battery of vaccines at the same time. He said that a small child probably doesn't need to have that Hepatitis vaccination right now since it is a sexually transmitted disease, a parent can reasonably wait many years before such a vaccination.
So if Christie has a similar point of view then there may actually merely be clarification going on and not so much backpedalling.
And thus, the cycle continues. Why would you tip for good service if you have been systematically ignored, served lower-quality food and have to wait longer?
You are assuming that non-good tippers will get bad service. That is not necessarily so. What routinely happens is that known good tippers get outstanding service, moderate tippers get good service, and only the most troublesome customers get bad service to encourage them not to return. Even modest tipping is a win for the staff, they won't want to lose those customers.
Eh, I think the restaurant business was looking into doing something like this as well... (maybe they do now that FourSquare is processing payments). Imagine if a restaurant knew as soon as walked in how much you tipped them (or other restaurants in the "socio-financial network") last time?
Happens all the time. Waiters/waitresses recognize past customers. A little mark on the ticket lets the cooks know the good tippers.
Restaurants with delivery service recognize addresses. Good tippers get moved to the head of the queue, a little extra care is taken with their order, etc.
Aaaaannnd what side of the battle you think they will be on? You know, after having sworn oaths etc, and a command structure that can say "bang! you're dead" for not obeying orders?
They swore oaths to the Constitution and not blind loyalty to a President, nor a commander nor a command structure. They only swore to obey lawful orders from that command structure, i.e. orders within the bounds of the Constitution. Contrary to the belief of many civilians, soldiers and Marines are not mindless robots that will follow all orders.
Or do you consider that every ex-miltary person has a raging libertarian anti-government hard-on? And want to kill their former squad mates?
You mean like in a civil war where half the country feels the other half has betrayed the constitution and the people? When things go that bad active duty military are picking sides just live former military and other civilians. Read up on the US Civil War, a major problem for the Union was that many of its best officers and troops joined the Confederate forces. Robert E Lee was offered command of both the Union Army and the Confederate Army.
If they are making it easy to run "normal" Linux, why not install the appropriate libs and allow Linux apps to run side-by-side with Chrome apps?
Because that opens a big gaping hole in Chrome's security. Part of the security of Chrome OS is to not let users install binaries. They only get web apps.
This model is broadening to a degree with the ability to run some Android apps. However my understanding is that these apps must be pure java, no NDK, no direct usage of the Linux kernel and other related system level libraries. The Android app lives entirely in its Java sandbox.
The "we were kids when we saw episodes 1-3" argument is perfectly valid. However I think it would be fair to say that from episodes 1-3 to 4-6 the target age group dropped from age 15'ish to age 10'ish. I think that is a legitimate complaint. Although I will entertain the thought that the change began in 3 with the ewoks.
What time line change? Its an alternate parallel universe. From the original TV series we "know" that a parallel universe with a "slightly" different federation history is perfectly legit.:-)
A government could do so without fixing the currency to gold.
Sure a government can fix the price of gold without going to the gold standard but the government can not go to the gold standard without fixing the price of gold. See the difference?
That's not what I am saying. I am saying a government can prohibit private ownership and trading without going to a gold standard. And that such a prohibition is *not* fixing the price of gold, as your chart demonstrates in the early 1970s when such a situation existed and the price roughly doubled.
I have no idea why a nation would want to do so, our time interval just seems a legislative fluke.
Read the wikipedia article on Bretton Wood. It tells you many reasons why the US abandoned it. The main reason is that the gold standard does not allow for flexibility to deal with economic change.
The legislative fluke I am referring to is leaving the gold standard but not removing the prohibition on ownership and trading, early 1970s.
Your chart does show the price of gold roughly doubling during the interval so the prohibition doesn't seem to fix the price all by itself.
In 1934 the Gold Reserve Act changed the value of gold from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35. That is government price fixing.
The interval I am referring to is the early 1970s where the US was off the gold standard but the prohibition on private ownership and trading was still in effect. I was offering an example of such a prohibition not being equivalent to fixing the price.
Outlawing private ownership and trading removes a major source of volatility.
How is that different than fixing the price of gold? To me outlawing private ownership and trading are methods to fix the price of gold. All I have been saying is that a gold standard will not work if gold can be bought and sold on an open market. We seem to agree on that. You just use different terminology.
Well it essentially puts all the gold in the government treasury. A government could do so without fixing the currency to gold. There was a very brief interval where this was the situation in the US. The US abandoned Bretton Wood and then a few years later removed the prohibition on private ownership. I have no idea why a nation would want to do so, our time interval just seems a legislative fluke. Your chart does show the price of gold roughly doubling during the interval so the prohibition doesn't seem to fix the price all by itself.
Have you seen this graph. Notice how the price of gold is pretty stable up till about 1971? There is no way one could have a dollar tied to a physical amount of gold with the volatility of gold prices these days.
You know what happened in 1971? The US unilaterally exited Bretton Wood and the international exchange rate was no longer fixed. Those two stable plateaus around $20 and $35, those are the prices at which an ounce of gold was fixed during those time frames. Where things get really wild in the mid 1970s, that's where US citizens were allowed to own and trade gold once again.
Pegging the dollar to gold essentially outlaws volatility. Outlawing private ownership and trading removes a major source of volatility. The gold standard is as doable today as it was in the past. The reason not to return to the gold standard is to avoid or moderate various economic problems that periodically occur. A gold standard would prevent the federal reserve from using monetary policy to curb inflation and deflation, ease economic downturns, respond to various crisis, etc. The lack of a flexible monetary policy is one of the things believed to have contributed to the severity of the great depression of the 1930s.
A gold standard is doable, its just naive bad policy. It a cure for the overspending disease, but its an outdated ineffective cure with terrible side effects like many other medicines from previous centuries.
[Context: US on a gold standard] You already have gold, that US Dollar represents a certain amount of gold sitting in the US Treasury.
When did that happen? It wasn't that way when we went off the gold standard. If every printed note were "turned in" there wouldn't be enough gold to cover it.
A government is free to issue gold backed notes that may or may not be redeemable for actual gold. Note that the US government prohibited private ownership of both actual gold and previously issued federal gold certificates in 1934, requiring that both be sold to the treasury. Under the post-World War II Bretton Woods system we had a couple of decades of the dollar fixed to a certain amount of gold but not redeemable for gold.
You missed a very important point. Gold standard only works when the trading price of gold is fixed as it was in the US between 1944 and 1971. That was done by the Bretton Woods system.
A gold standard by definition fixes the value of a currency unit at a particular quantity of gold.
Bretton Wood was about requiring nations to define a target exchange rate between their currencies and US dollars, indirectly tying them to gold since the US dollar was to be tied to gold, and to keep actual exchange rates close to that target. The US promised not to change the dollar/gold rate, necessary to get buy-in for the US dollar to become the reserve currency. So the US was fixed and other nations had a small amount of room to wobble.
You missed my point. On the gold standard yes a dollar would be worth a set amount of gold in a repository somewhere but the buying value of said dollar would still be bound to the intrinsic value of gold in general. The US government doesn't control the whole world's gold supply and if some schmuck decided to buy up 10% of the gold in the rest of the world and dump it into the ocean, the remaining 90% of the gold stocks will instantly rise in value. After this, with gold worth more, the dollar will have more buying power*, creating deflation. Boom, relatively easy currency manipulation and certainly well within the capabilities of certain governments. *buying power as an assumption that you could buy the same things with external gold.
"relatively easy" ?
"well within the capabilities" ?
(1) Could you explain the part about a nation acquiring 10% of the world's gold and flushing that value/wealth down the toilet? I seem to missing something with regard to the logic.
(2) Three words: marine salvage, robotics. Dumping stuff in the ocean ain't what it used to be. I'd love to see someone do as you suggest. It would be the mother of all prizes for underwater robotics research. The US scientific and engineering communities would probably greatly benefit as the suppliers of the "shovels" in the new "gold rush". It would be Apollo program like and reap benefits for decades to follow.
Slashdot Mirror
Rail guns fire slugs; they aren't about to put an exploding shell in a rail gun with that much electrical and magnetic energy around.
Then railguns will be of limited use for targets on land. When the trajectory needs to be more ballistic for indirect fire you won't have the speed necessary for kinetic weapons.
Unless the projectile store all its energy in form of momentum instead of explosive To do that, you just need to shoot your projectile at ridiculous speeds.
Kinetic energy projectiles have limitations with respect to indirect fire, to avoid redundancy see an earlier response: http://slashdot.org/comments.p....
Yes they are, an aluminium slug impacting the ground at say Mach 15 does not need any gunpowder to create a large hole in the ground or destroy a building, the kinetic energy of the projectile will do that all by itself.
Only for line of sight type shots and shots with a relatively low ballistic trajectory. For shorter ranged shots with a more ballistic trajectory the launch speed would need to be greatly reduced. Note that if the shot is sufficiently high (perhaps a target on a reverse slope) the projectile is coming down at a gravity induced speed, not at a launch induced speed.
Kinetic energy projectiles do not completely replace explosive warheads.
Laser are line of sight only, they can't do indirect fire. A ship would also need rail guns to launch projectiles. Its an improvement, but there will still be ammunition limits.
They are not eliminating all "gunpowder". They may be able to eliminate the propellant used to launch projectiles but many of those projectiles will still have explosive warheads. Its an improvement, but there will still be armored magazines for such projectiles.
2008. The retraction of Wakefield's fraudulent study and him being stripped of his medical license didn't happen until 2010.
Careful. It sounds like you are saying there is nothing wrong with basing a political position on a single study that goes against the vast scientific consensus.
Vaccination exemptions are highest in Orange County, which while in California, leans very conservative in politics.
You mean "very conservative" for California. Its fiscally conservative but socially liberal to moderate.
First off, hepatitis can certainly be spread through non-sexual contact. So that's out the window.
Paul was speaking on CNBC earlier today, transcripts aren't up yet, but he seems to have been specifically using Hepatitis B being given to newborns in a cocktail of a half dozen other vaccines. He mentioned that Hepatitis B is transmitted sexually and through blood transfusions. He mentioned having the various vaccines staggered over time rather than all at once.
In what I think is the same Paul interview you're referring to, he said this, "I've heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children, who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines." So we have a public figure using the media to further perpetuate nonsense that's been scientifically debunked.
Well I was hoping that he was not referring to the Jenny McCarthy autism epidemic nonsense when he said that, and was referring to some legit very rare side effect or allergic reaction or rare drug interaction. Things orders of magnitude less likely than getting the disease being vaccinated against.
In any case the all-in-one cocktails seem like a cost reduction thing. Or a lack of trust that a mother will bring the kid back for followups. I recall seeing in my immunization records that my mother brought me in for a series of vaccinations over a period of months. Sounds like Paul is advocating such an approach.
In other words, Paul, like Christie, is courting the Evangelical vote.
Actually another poster points out that according to the CDC vaccination rates are higher in the bible belt.
So maybe they are courting the coastal soccer moms who go to hollywood celebrities for medical advice.
Don't freak out at the phrase "vaccine choice". The speaker may not mean what you assume.
Rand Paul said something similar in a TV interview today. The interviewer was shocked and Rand Paul explained that "vaccine choice" does not inherently mean some science denier who does not believe in medicine. What Paul, and probably Christie, mean is that parents can reasonably delay some vaccines. Paul mentioned that children sometimes receive a battery of vaccines at the same time. He said that a small child probably doesn't need to have that Hepatitis vaccination right now since it is a sexually transmitted disease, a parent can reasonably wait many years before such a vaccination.
So if Christie has a similar point of view then there may actually merely be clarification going on and not so much backpedalling.
And thus, the cycle continues. Why would you tip for good service if you have been systematically ignored, served lower-quality food and have to wait longer?
You are assuming that non-good tippers will get bad service. That is not necessarily so. What routinely happens is that known good tippers get outstanding service, moderate tippers get good service, and only the most troublesome customers get bad service to encourage them not to return. Even modest tipping is a win for the staff, they won't want to lose those customers.
Eh, I think the restaurant business was looking into doing something like this as well... (maybe they do now that FourSquare is processing payments). Imagine if a restaurant knew as soon as walked in how much you tipped them (or other restaurants in the "socio-financial network") last time?
Happens all the time. Waiters/waitresses recognize past customers. A little mark on the ticket lets the cooks know the good tippers.
Restaurants with delivery service recognize addresses. Good tippers get moved to the head of the queue, a little extra care is taken with their order, etc.
Aaaaannnd what side of the battle you think they will be on? You know, after having sworn oaths etc, and a command structure that can say "bang! you're dead" for not obeying orders?
They swore oaths to the Constitution and not blind loyalty to a President, nor a commander nor a command structure. They only swore to obey lawful orders from that command structure, i.e. orders within the bounds of the Constitution. Contrary to the belief of many civilians, soldiers and Marines are not mindless robots that will follow all orders.
Or do you consider that every ex-miltary person has a raging libertarian anti-government hard-on? And want to kill their former squad mates?
You mean like in a civil war where half the country feels the other half has betrayed the constitution and the people? When things go that bad active duty military are picking sides just live former military and other civilians. Read up on the US Civil War, a major problem for the Union was that many of its best officers and troops joined the Confederate forces. Robert E Lee was offered command of both the Union Army and the Confederate Army.
... there was a CoG (Continuity of Government) plan, at least for leadership. Don't ask me who they thought was going to deliver the mail ...
"The Postman"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
No joke, the US Army has plans for "if we have to invade Canada."
We have had to invade friends before, for example France in 1944.
If they are making it easy to run "normal" Linux, why not install the appropriate libs and allow Linux apps to run side-by-side with Chrome apps?
Because that opens a big gaping hole in Chrome's security. Part of the security of Chrome OS is to not let users install binaries. They only get web apps.
This model is broadening to a degree with the ability to run some Android apps. However my understanding is that these apps must be pure java, no NDK, no direct usage of the Linux kernel and other related system level libraries. The Android app lives entirely in its Java sandbox.
The "we were kids when we saw episodes 1-3" argument is perfectly valid. However I think it would be fair to say that from episodes 1-3 to 4-6 the target age group dropped from age 15'ish to age 10'ish. I think that is a legitimate complaint. Although I will entertain the thought that the change began in 3 with the ewoks.
Yah the time line changes ...
What time line change? Its an alternate parallel universe. From the original TV series we "know" that a parallel universe with a "slightly" different federation history is perfectly legit. :-)
A government could do so without fixing the currency to gold.
Sure a government can fix the price of gold without going to the gold standard but the government can not go to the gold standard without fixing the price of gold. See the difference?
That's not what I am saying. I am saying a government can prohibit private ownership and trading without going to a gold standard. And that such a prohibition is *not* fixing the price of gold, as your chart demonstrates in the early 1970s when such a situation existed and the price roughly doubled.
I have no idea why a nation would want to do so, our time interval just seems a legislative fluke.
Read the wikipedia article on Bretton Wood. It tells you many reasons why the US abandoned it. The main reason is that the gold standard does not allow for flexibility to deal with economic change.
The legislative fluke I am referring to is leaving the gold standard but not removing the prohibition on ownership and trading, early 1970s.
Your chart does show the price of gold roughly doubling during the interval so the prohibition doesn't seem to fix the price all by itself.
In 1934 the Gold Reserve Act changed the value of gold from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35. That is government price fixing.
The interval I am referring to is the early 1970s where the US was off the gold standard but the prohibition on private ownership and trading was still in effect. I was offering an example of such a prohibition not being equivalent to fixing the price.
Outlawing private ownership and trading removes a major source of volatility.
How is that different than fixing the price of gold? To me outlawing private ownership and trading are methods to fix the price of gold. All I have been saying is that a gold standard will not work if gold can be bought and sold on an open market. We seem to agree on that. You just use different terminology.
Well it essentially puts all the gold in the government treasury. A government could do so without fixing the currency to gold. There was a very brief interval where this was the situation in the US. The US abandoned Bretton Wood and then a few years later removed the prohibition on private ownership. I have no idea why a nation would want to do so, our time interval just seems a legislative fluke. Your chart does show the price of gold roughly doubling during the interval so the prohibition doesn't seem to fix the price all by itself.
Have you seen this graph. Notice how the price of gold is pretty stable up till about 1971? There is no way one could have a dollar tied to a physical amount of gold with the volatility of gold prices these days.
You know what happened in 1971? The US unilaterally exited Bretton Wood and the international exchange rate was no longer fixed. Those two stable plateaus around $20 and $35, those are the prices at which an ounce of gold was fixed during those time frames. Where things get really wild in the mid 1970s, that's where US citizens were allowed to own and trade gold once again.
Pegging the dollar to gold essentially outlaws volatility. Outlawing private ownership and trading removes a major source of volatility. The gold standard is as doable today as it was in the past. The reason not to return to the gold standard is to avoid or moderate various economic problems that periodically occur. A gold standard would prevent the federal reserve from using monetary policy to curb inflation and deflation, ease economic downturns, respond to various crisis, etc. The lack of a flexible monetary policy is one of the things believed to have contributed to the severity of the great depression of the 1930s.
A gold standard is doable, its just naive bad policy. It a cure for the overspending disease, but its an outdated ineffective cure with terrible side effects like many other medicines from previous centuries.
[Context: US on a gold standard]
You already have gold, that US Dollar represents a certain amount of gold sitting in the US Treasury.
When did that happen? It wasn't that way when we went off the gold standard. If every printed note were "turned in" there wouldn't be enough gold to cover it.
A government is free to issue gold backed notes that may or may not be redeemable for actual gold. Note that the US government prohibited private ownership of both actual gold and previously issued federal gold certificates in 1934, requiring that both be sold to the treasury. Under the post-World War II Bretton Woods system we had a couple of decades of the dollar fixed to a certain amount of gold but not redeemable for gold.
You missed a very important point. Gold standard only works when the trading price of gold is fixed as it was in the US between 1944 and 1971. That was done by the Bretton Woods system.
A gold standard by definition fixes the value of a currency unit at a particular quantity of gold.
Bretton Wood was about requiring nations to define a target exchange rate between their currencies and US dollars, indirectly tying them to gold since the US dollar was to be tied to gold, and to keep actual exchange rates close to that target. The US promised not to change the dollar/gold rate, necessary to get buy-in for the US dollar to become the reserve currency. So the US was fixed and other nations had a small amount of room to wobble.
Yes that was sarcasm and an attempt at humor. Note the ":-)".
You missed my point. On the gold standard yes a dollar would be worth a set amount of gold in a repository somewhere but the buying value of said dollar would still be bound to the intrinsic value of gold in general. The US government doesn't control the whole world's gold supply and if some schmuck decided to buy up 10% of the gold in the rest of the world and dump it into the ocean, the remaining 90% of the gold stocks will instantly rise in value. After this, with gold worth more, the dollar will have more buying power*, creating deflation. Boom, relatively easy currency manipulation and certainly well within the capabilities of certain governments. *buying power as an assumption that you could buy the same things with external gold.
"relatively easy" ?
:-)
"well within the capabilities" ?
(1) Could you explain the part about a nation acquiring 10% of the world's gold and flushing that value/wealth down the toilet? I seem to missing something with regard to the logic.
(2) Three words: marine salvage, robotics. Dumping stuff in the ocean ain't what it used to be. I'd love to see someone do as you suggest. It would be the mother of all prizes for underwater robotics research. The US scientific and engineering communities would probably greatly benefit as the suppliers of the "shovels" in the new "gold rush". It would be Apollo program like and reap benefits for decades to follow.