Meh. In peacetime, yes. But a lot of that stuff isn't so critical once the bullets start flying. Fresh veggies? "Dammit, there's a war on! Eat MREs, and like it!" Personnel changes? "Are you an admiral? If so, here's your chopper sir. If not, dammit, there's a war on!" Supplies? "A good navy ship has six extras of everything to start with."
I'm not the expert you are, but I bet that if necessary, a carrier that produced its own jet fuel could spend a good fraction of a year at sea without resupply.
so big and heavy that the plane could no longer carry any actual bombs
Does it matter? A working nuclear aircraft could cruise along at sea level at mach 2, pouring sonic booms and radioactive fallout over the entire U.S. eastern seaboard for weeks or months. It's its own weapon.
I disagree. If you do it right, war has a *great* energy return on energy invested. You invest a little energy in building ships and planes and guns, a little more energy to fuel them, and then you go off and conquer a gigantic oilfield which provides energy for your entire nation for decades.
That was one of the Germans' big plans for World War II anyway. Turns out it's a high-risk investment.
To both the parent and child posters: the difference between gasoline, kerosene, diesel, etc. is negligible. The basic chemical process described here can make any of these, it's just a matter of fine-tuning the reactions.
Can't that "non-fossil-fuel-based electric power" alone propel the car? Why do we need to make more fuel, resulting in more emissions, and poor energy conversion efficiency?
Because the key requirement for a vehicle energy storage system is that it pack a hell of a lot of energy in a small space. Unlike your house, your car has to carry its energy storage around as it moves.
Lithium batteries = 500 kilojoules per kilogram Gasoline = 43,000 kilojoules per kilogram.
My hybrid car holds about 25 kilograms of gasoline. If I wanted to store the same energy in batteries, the battery pack would weigh more than TWO TONS. If I redesigned the car to handle the extra weight of the battery pack, it'd need a bigger electric motor, which means I'd need an even *bigger* battery pack...
Given the weight restriction, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to store electricity for vehicles in energy-dense chemical fuel form, even if you waste a little energy by doing so.
And as for emissions, this process is CO2 neutral, assuming you get the carbon to make your fuel from CO2.
Steam reforming is the opposite of the process you need. It does this: Hydrocarbon + water -> hydrogen + CO
You want to *make* hydrocarbons, not destroy them. The Synfuel process you link to is the Fischer-Tropsch process, which is exactly what the Navy is doing. The trick is tuning it to make only the *right* hydrocarbons.
Coal stored on board as a feedstock for carbon would take up less room than the jet fuel
I really like the idea of modern carriers with oldschool coal bunkers and gritty guys below decks shoveling coal.
But you won't save much space that way. 1 kilogram of pure carbon coal has a volume of about 0.77 l. If you add enough hydrogens to that kilogram of C to make it into jet fuel (roughly 2 H's per C), the product will weigh 1.17 kg, and have a volume of around 1.44 l.
So storing the carbon as coal rather than jet fuel only reduces its volume by a factor of 2. Not enough to make it worthwhile.
There's hippy FUD, and then there's actual engineering info. Guess which one I got.
Nuclear reactors carriers operate with a "closed loop" cycle: nuclear fuel is sealed in a container, where it heats a fluid. The fluid flows out, does some useful work, and flows back in. The working fluid becomes highly contaminated, but so long as it doesn't leak out, everything's okay.
In nuclear aircraft designs, the working fluid would be the outside air. No container, no shielding, no closed loop, just air flowing over raw uranium fuel at supersonic speeds, heating up, and shooting out the back of the plane carrying all manner of crap along with it.
Saying that nuclear aircraft and nuclear carriers are equally safe is like claiming that big pool of flaming gasoline is as safe as a working car engine, because hey, they're both burning gasoline right? The issue is *containment*.
Now, in principle you could design a fully contained nuclear aircraft engine, which indirectly heated the air using a working fluid inside sealed plumbing, with heat exchangers. However, that extra crap adds a ton of weight, and nobody's managed to design one of those that will get off the ground.
Your union-busting tale sounds like something a big American company would do, but just so I understand, here....
Chafing under the pressure of American organized labor, Boeing outsourced the difficult parts of its airliner to *ITALY*?
Italy's a wonderful country, but the place isn't exactly a capitalist pig's paradise. Last time I was there, I discovered that the train station departure boards have indicators for "on time", "delayed", and "on strike".
Like it or not, the 2004 series reset the bar for what "Battlestar Galactica" is. You can't make a new BSG based on the '70s version, totally ignoring the 2004 version.
The article is about unmanned aircraft, which is not the same thing as autonomous. We're probably talking about vehicles which have a real human pilot, she's just not in the vehicle.
Given that, there's a pretty simple way to make tower communications work. It requires a little hardware, but not much. (I don't have a solution for the problem of detecting and avoiding other aircraft.)
The pilot operates his vehicle from a ground station as usual. To deal with air traffic control, he calls the local tower on the phone. He's got a special PIN that came with his UAV license, when he calls the tower and authenticates with his PIN, his phone call is patched in to the ground-to-air communications channel. His UAV has a normal transponder, so he has both voice and squawk code contact with the tower. If the tower asks him to switch frequencies or contact another air traffic control authority, he types the new freq into his phone keypad and his call is transferred to a similar system at the new tower.
Simple, cheap, and as bulletproof as landline telephone service can be, which is a hell of a lot more bulletproof than air-to-ground radio. All you need to buy is one phone patch box for each tower.
If you don't like the phone idea, you can simply require that UAVs carry the same radio equipment that manned aircraft must carry, and that they must have a system to control the radio and rebroadcast its signals down to the pilot on the ground. If you do it that way, the tower can treat the UAV as just another plane. The disadvantage is that it increases the complexity of the UAV, and is overall less bulletprooof than the phone system.
If we were talking about *autonomous* UAVs, that's a whole nother ball of fish. (kettle of wax?) Nobody in their right mind allows any autonomous vehicle bigger than a Roomba out in an uncontrolled "free range" environment. It's premature to discuss air traffic control for autonomous aircraft before we prove we can handle autonomous watercraft and ground vehicles, which are simpler problems and/or carry less penalty for failure.
The single safest mode of human locomotion today in terms of injuries per passenger-mile is the elevator ("lift" for those in the UK)...they have been virtually exclusively under automatic control for at least 50 years now.
If I could build a car or plane that had an exclusive right-of-way that makes it physically impossible for another vehicle or other object to be in its path, and a mechanical safety system which causes it to 100% reliably stop dead in its tracks if there's a mechanical problem, I'd have a pretty safe vehicle whether it was autonomous or manually operated.
Point being the safety records of elevators have more to do with the mode of transport than its control system.
At the end, the votes are upended on the floor and everybody looks at them, and can count them themselves.
...whereupon I stealthily pocket ballots that support my opponents, and mix in some extra pre-marked ballots for my candidate into the pile. If it still looks like I'm not going to win, I take a quick trip to the restroom to flush the evidence, and then accuse my opponent's supporters of ballot tampering. The whole operation dissolves into an inconclusive bloody fistfight, which serves my purpose just fine.
The only system I can see that works is one which relies on a ballot-counting authority whom everyone trusts, watched up by a system of non-counting observers from all sides.
Which is pretty much what we already do in the U.S.
It's more of a a teaching article, not a specific new proposal. Its goal is to describe an idea to people who're not familiar to it. Maybe you're an expert already, but I found it interesting.
When I moved into my new house, the digital readout on my microwave oven got bumped around, and 2/3 of the LED segments stopped working.
Basically, my microwave's clock is now a PassWindow system for which I don't have the cool transparent keycard.
But since I know what I'm looking at is numbers, it didn't take me long to figure out which LED segments were dead, and now I can read the display just fine even though it's busted.
The same is true for Passwindow. I bet that with 5-10 instances of ciphertext and the knowledge that the cleartext is a numeric code, you could work out the key.
(PS: Yes, I could take my microwave apart and fix the LED display, but I'm not real excited about doing that because IT'S A FREAKING MICROWAVE.)
A problem with your plan: copyrights are transferrable, and many are held by corporations. Thus the life of the copyright holder could go on forever.
But you said "life of the author". But authorship is not always clear. The Walt Disney Corporation owns the copyright to Snow White (I think), but who's the author? Walt? The art director? The music director? Whoever wrote the screenplay?
Even if you could pin down a single human author, companies will never accept a copyright law which requires their employees to hold copyright to the work they make for hire. Can you imagine if Microsoft had to get permission from its lead software engineer to make more copies of Windows? Especially if that engineer now works at Apple?
The only workable date is the date of creation of the work, which is how the system works now.
No. If there's one thing that instantly pegs someone as "not American", it's using the word 'boffin'. Either that, or looking shocked when we talk about "spanking a child's fanny."
and, more importantly, reduce calls during your off hours because a user locked out his/her account due to CAPS LOCK being on when entering a password.
Here's a nickel, kid. Go get yourself a real operating system. One whose password fields pop up a little icon to indicate that Caps Lock is active.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh. In peacetime, yes. But a lot of that stuff isn't so critical once the bullets start flying.
Fresh veggies? "Dammit, there's a war on! Eat MREs, and like it!"
Personnel changes? "Are you an admiral? If so, here's your chopper sir. If not, dammit, there's a war on!"
Supplies? "A good navy ship has six extras of everything to start with."
I'm not the expert you are, but I bet that if necessary, a carrier that produced its own jet fuel could spend a good fraction of a year at sea without resupply.
Yeah, but you can put a machine inside a much smaller lead box. Unmanned is definitely the way to go in this case.
Also, if it's unmanned, you can crash land it in enemy territory, so you never have to touch the thing again after you turn it on.
Dammit, you stole my joke. :(
so big and heavy that the plane could no longer carry any actual bombs
Does it matter? A working nuclear aircraft could cruise along at sea level at mach 2, pouring sonic booms and radioactive fallout over the entire U.S. eastern seaboard for weeks or months. It's its own weapon.
I disagree. If you do it right, war has a *great* energy return on energy invested. You invest a little energy in building ships and planes and guns, a little more energy to fuel them, and then you go off and conquer a gigantic oilfield which provides energy for your entire nation for decades.
That was one of the Germans' big plans for World War II anyway. Turns out it's a high-risk investment.
To both the parent and child posters: the difference between gasoline, kerosene, diesel, etc. is negligible. The basic chemical process described here can make any of these, it's just a matter of fine-tuning the reactions.
Can't that "non-fossil-fuel-based electric power" alone propel the car? Why do we need to make more fuel, resulting in more emissions, and poor energy conversion efficiency?
Because the key requirement for a vehicle energy storage system is that it pack a hell of a lot of energy in a small space. Unlike your house, your car has to carry its energy storage around as it moves.
Lithium batteries = 500 kilojoules per kilogram
Gasoline = 43,000 kilojoules per kilogram.
My hybrid car holds about 25 kilograms of gasoline. If I wanted to store the same energy in batteries, the battery pack would weigh more than TWO TONS. If I redesigned the car to handle the extra weight of the battery pack, it'd need a bigger electric motor, which means I'd need an even *bigger* battery pack...
Given the weight restriction, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to store electricity for vehicles in energy-dense chemical fuel form, even if you waste a little energy by doing so.
And as for emissions, this process is CO2 neutral, assuming you get the carbon to make your fuel from CO2.
Steam reforming is the opposite of the process you need. It does this:
Hydrocarbon + water -> hydrogen + CO
You want to *make* hydrocarbons, not destroy them. The Synfuel process you link to is the Fischer-Tropsch process, which is exactly what the Navy is doing. The trick is tuning it to make only the *right* hydrocarbons.
It's just not practical for combat aircraft.
Well, hydrogen was used in at least one type of operational combat aircraft, the German zepplin bombers of World War I.
It's the exception that proves the rule, though: They did not fare well against airplanes firing incendiary bullets.
Coal stored on board as a feedstock for carbon would take up less room than the jet fuel
I really like the idea of modern carriers with oldschool coal bunkers and gritty guys below decks shoveling coal.
But you won't save much space that way. 1 kilogram of pure carbon coal has a volume of about 0.77 l. If you add enough hydrogens to that kilogram of C to make it into jet fuel (roughly 2 H's per C), the product will weigh 1.17 kg, and have a volume of around 1.44 l.
So storing the carbon as coal rather than jet fuel only reduces its volume by a factor of 2. Not enough to make it worthwhile.
There's hippy FUD, and then there's actual engineering info. Guess which one I got.
Nuclear reactors carriers operate with a "closed loop" cycle: nuclear fuel is sealed in a container, where it heats a fluid. The fluid flows out, does some useful work, and flows back in. The working fluid becomes highly contaminated, but so long as it doesn't leak out, everything's okay.
In nuclear aircraft designs, the working fluid would be the outside air. No container, no shielding, no closed loop, just air flowing over raw uranium fuel at supersonic speeds, heating up, and shooting out the back of the plane carrying all manner of crap along with it.
Saying that nuclear aircraft and nuclear carriers are equally safe is like claiming that big pool of flaming gasoline is as safe as a working car engine, because hey, they're both burning gasoline right? The issue is *containment*.
Now, in principle you could design a fully contained nuclear aircraft engine, which indirectly heated the air using a working fluid inside sealed plumbing, with heat exchangers. However, that extra crap adds a ton of weight, and nobody's managed to design one of those that will get off the ground.
I believe step 3 in your plan is
3) Large amounts of radioactive material fly out the back of the jet, contaminating everything in sight.
Nuclear aircraft are quite feasible, provided you really, really don't care about flyover country.
(Oh, by the way: you can skip the steam in step 1, and just heat the air directly.)
I'm counting online pages. Who reads the New York Times on *paper*, anyway? Sheesh.
The most newsworthy part of this article from a Slashdot perspective isn't that Rock Band Beatles is coming out. We already knew that.
It's that the New York TImes, the old grey lady, published a *nine page* video game review.
Your union-busting tale sounds like something a big American company would do, but just so I understand, here....
Chafing under the pressure of American organized labor, Boeing outsourced the difficult parts of its airliner to *ITALY*?
Italy's a wonderful country, but the place isn't exactly a capitalist pig's paradise. Last time I was there, I discovered that the train station departure boards have indicators for "on time", "delayed", and "on strike".
Like it or not, the 2004 series reset the bar for what "Battlestar Galactica" is. You can't make a new BSG based on the '70s version, totally ignoring the 2004 version.
It'd be like making a modern version of Pyramus and Thisbe.
(Not sure what I'm talking about? Read the plot synopsis in the link.)
The article is about unmanned aircraft, which is not the same thing as autonomous. We're probably talking about vehicles which have a real human pilot, she's just not in the vehicle.
Given that, there's a pretty simple way to make tower communications work. It requires a little hardware, but not much. (I don't have a solution for the problem of detecting and avoiding other aircraft.)
The pilot operates his vehicle from a ground station as usual. To deal with air traffic control, he calls the local tower on the phone. He's got a special PIN that came with his UAV license, when he calls the tower and authenticates with his PIN, his phone call is patched in to the ground-to-air communications channel. His UAV has a normal transponder, so he has both voice and squawk code contact with the tower. If the tower asks him to switch frequencies or contact another air traffic control authority, he types the new freq into his phone keypad and his call is transferred to a similar system at the new tower.
Simple, cheap, and as bulletproof as landline telephone service can be, which is a hell of a lot more bulletproof than air-to-ground radio. All you need to buy is one phone patch box for each tower.
If you don't like the phone idea, you can simply require that UAVs carry the same radio equipment that manned aircraft must carry, and that they must have a system to control the radio and rebroadcast its signals down to the pilot on the ground. If you do it that way, the tower can treat the UAV as just another plane. The disadvantage is that it increases the complexity of the UAV, and is overall less bulletprooof than the phone system.
If we were talking about *autonomous* UAVs, that's a whole nother ball of fish. (kettle of wax?) Nobody in their right mind allows any autonomous vehicle bigger than a Roomba out in an uncontrolled "free range" environment. It's premature to discuss air traffic control for autonomous aircraft before we prove we can handle autonomous watercraft and ground vehicles, which are simpler problems and/or carry less penalty for failure.
The single safest mode of human locomotion today in terms of injuries per passenger-mile is the elevator ("lift" for those in the UK)...they have been virtually exclusively under automatic control for at least 50 years now.
If I could build a car or plane that had an exclusive right-of-way that makes it physically impossible for another vehicle or other object to be in its path, and a mechanical safety system which causes it to 100% reliably stop dead in its tracks if there's a mechanical problem, I'd have a pretty safe vehicle whether it was autonomous or manually operated.
Point being the safety records of elevators have more to do with the mode of transport than its control system.
Yes, it took a really long time, yes, it produced votes for Lizard People
Sir, I protest! A democracy that forbids people from voting for Lizard People is no democracy at all!
At the end, the votes are upended on the floor and everybody looks at them, and can count them themselves.
The only system I can see that works is one which relies on a ballot-counting authority whom everyone trusts, watched up by a system of non-counting observers from all sides.
Which is pretty much what we already do in the U.S.
It's more of a a teaching article, not a specific new proposal. Its goal is to describe an idea to people who're not familiar to it. Maybe you're an expert already, but I found it interesting.
When I moved into my new house, the digital readout on my microwave oven got bumped around, and 2/3 of the LED segments stopped working.
Basically, my microwave's clock is now a PassWindow system for which I don't have the cool transparent keycard.
But since I know what I'm looking at is numbers, it didn't take me long to figure out which LED segments were dead, and now I can read the display just fine even though it's busted.
The same is true for Passwindow. I bet that with 5-10 instances of ciphertext and the knowledge that the cleartext is a numeric code, you could work out the key.
(PS: Yes, I could take my microwave apart and fix the LED display, but I'm not real excited about doing that because IT'S A FREAKING MICROWAVE.)
A problem with your plan: copyrights are transferrable, and many are held by corporations. Thus the life of the copyright holder could go on forever.
But you said "life of the author". But authorship is not always clear. The Walt Disney Corporation owns the copyright to Snow White (I think), but who's the author? Walt? The art director? The music director? Whoever wrote the screenplay?
Even if you could pin down a single human author, companies will never accept a copyright law which requires their employees to hold copyright to the work they make for hire. Can you imagine if Microsoft had to get permission from its lead software engineer to make more copies of Windows? Especially if that engineer now works at Apple?
The only workable date is the date of creation of the work, which is how the system works now.
America doesn't use the word 'boffins'?
No. If there's one thing that instantly pegs someone as "not American", it's using the word 'boffin'. Either that, or looking shocked when we talk about "spanking a child's fanny."
and, more importantly, reduce calls during your off hours because a user locked out his/her account due to CAPS LOCK being on when entering a password.
Here's a nickel, kid. Go get yourself a real operating system. One whose password fields pop up a little icon to indicate that Caps Lock is active.
-- supercilious Mac user