You present only a single argument that NES is the greatest of all time because it followed the collapse.
I do so hate repeating myself, but here you go:
The NES drug the console market out of a complete collapse into a thriving and expansive market. The quality was kept reasonably high through careful controls on the number of games that could be produced by each licensee. (To prevent the "game dumping" problem that occurred in the Atari generation.) It set the stage for the modern video game market, brought the arcade home in ways that even the Colecovision couldn't, introduced the idea of story-driven action games rather than arcade console games, reorganized the market around a control scheme that lives on even today (i.e. the venerable gamepad), and is fondly remembered by nearly every generation of gamer.
Objectively the PS2 sold the most with the DS coming close soon.
The sales argument is irrelevant, I'm afraid. If you chart the size of the video game market as a whole it has grown at a rather fast clip with each generation of console. Because the market grows with each successive generation, the sales numbers alone cannot tell the entire story.
But the majority of gamers now were introduced to gaming via the PSX, and PS2.
And despite that, they have a strong reverence for the NES generation. Whether they were directly introduced to it or not, the concepts like "Power Glove", the original Super Mario Bros., Zelda, the Zapper, the 2 button gamepad, and other Nintendo-isms are etched into our cultural memory.
In comparison, the lasting culture of the Playstation is elusive at best. The players that don't remember the NES associate Final Fantasy with the Playstation. Same with Metal Gear. And that's about it. The console itself is not viewed as iconic, people do not do remixes of the music from Crash Bandicoot, no one remembers the controller prior to the Dual Shock, and no one has bothered to create PSX clones of the console as has been done with the NES.
Take it from an amateur video game historian. The impact of the NES has been felt by the market since the day it was introduced. Its relevance is just as strong today as it was then. The PSX made no lasting contribution to the market or our culture, and was all but forgotten when the next generation rolled around.
It's not nostalgia. I'm an avid collector of classic consoles and I can tell you from both history and the consoles sitting in my living room that the Playstation's impact was nowhere near that of the NES. The majority of the games for the PSX were, in fact, quite poor. The achievement of the Playstation was that it succeeded where the 3DO and the CD-i failed. It brought a standard multimedia computer platform* to the market in the form of a console, and succeeded in providing a "standard" base for developers to work from.
From a market perspective, it built heavily on the market that Nintendo and Sega had already built. Had the Playstation been introduced in the wake of the market crash it would have never succeeded. Instead, the market was already excited about the possibility of a multimedia console that catered to all ages. The Playstation was the first to deliver the right mixture of technology to meet demand, ergo it won by default.
* A multimedia computer platform at the time was considered a computer with a sound card, high resolution graphics, mpeg decoding, and a CD-ROM drive. Bit of a misnomer in modern terms, but it was high-tech stuff back then.
You are correct, The article is wrong. Zelda, not mario, was inspired by Miyamoto's exploration.
Actually, both are correct. Various aspects of Super Mario came from his trips into the woods (e.g. Miyamoto would daydream about climbing a tree high enough to get above the clouds, finding a magical castle, etc.), while the game of Zelda was more of a direct translation of his exploration of the woods and caves around his home. To tie it all together, Miyamoto basically had a very active imagination that he was able to translate into the games he designed. The latter part is a rare gift that is what made him so successful.:-)
The Playstation was definitely not the greatest console of all time. Its philosophy was, "Let's throw a bunch of crud against the wall and see what sticks." As a standardized platform for home entertainment it was highly successful. (In part, due to the low cost of its CD media.) However, if you want to actually look at a system that captured the hearts and minds of the market, the NES is probably IT.
The NES drug the console market out of a complete collapse into a thriving and expansive market. The quality was kept reasonably high through careful controls on the number of games that could be produced by each licensee. (To prevent the "game dumping" problem that occurred in the Atari generation.) It set the stage for the modern video game market, brought the arcade home in ways that even the Colecovision couldn't, introduced the idea of story-driven action games rather than arcade console games, reorganized the market around a control scheme that lives on even today (i.e. the venerable gamepad), and is fondly remembered by nearly every generation of gamer.
There simply has never been a console that has had the impact on the market that the original NES had. In its time it was without equal. I love the SNES as well, but the title for the "greatest" always has been and always will be on the NES.
All we can do is either keep our heads down until the current tyranny destroys itself and try to pick up the pieces
Well, Rome had ~500 years of tyranny, followed by ~1000 years of a split and crumbling empire with poor living conditions, rampant disease, hunger, and incredibly short lifespans. Soo... guess what? You're dead either way. Better to take a stand while you still can than wafting on a hope that "Rome will be a Republic once again! Someday. Soon. Maybe."
Of course, your rather dire attitude towards the US places your objectivity about the current political situation in question. I can guarantee you that things are not quite as bad as you're making them out to be. If the US crumbles, it will be more through ambivalence and poor maintenance than tyranny.
The first thought that comes to my mind is Rome. Once it slipped into the control of Julius Caesar, it never recovered. The Roman Republic was long lost to the tyranny of the Roman Empire. The end result was a complete collapse of Rome itself, a loss of world infrastructure, and a completely separate empire (the Byzantines) which was eventually overthrown by the Crusades and later the Ottomans.
I mean it would really suck to find the navigation memory scrambled and rebooting on take off when the plane is using the autopilot.
1. Military hardware is EMP shielded. This is to prevent enemies from taking out our multi-trillion dollar war infrastructure with a simple electronic overload.
2. Autopilot? Off the deck of a carrier? That's not the Spartan way, that's just madness!:P
I don't think many jets do manual takeoffs from a carrier anymore.
I don't think any jets do manual takeoffs from a carrier. (Unless you count VTOL craft like the Harrier Jumpjet.) The fighters are always launched to force them to clear the deck at takeoff speed. Planes that are too large for the launchers will tend to use JATO rockets to gain enough velocity by the end of the runway. Here's an image of modern carrier launch and recovery operations. It's dicey business WITH two operational catapults and arresting wires. As a result, not many pilots are willing to attempt an unlaunched flight off the deck of a carrier. Take a helicopter or a boat instead.
It would probably suck even more to find a spark igniting some piece of magnesium
Lord help whoever mounts flammable magnesium on the deck of an aircraft carrier. The Admirals would make his head roll so far he'd make a trip to Pluto and back just so the Admirals could kick it again!
When magnesium is used as a construction material, it's almost always alloyed with other metals to prevent this exact problem. The alloy reduces the ignition point to ranges where you're actually more concerned about aluminum combustion.
causing some weapons to detonate while staging
Weapons on deck are treated VERY carefully. All ordinance on-deck have safety pins in them that must be removed just before takeoff. This is to prevent accidental detonation. Ordinance is also hardened a bit to withstand the rigors of combat flight as well as enemy countermeasures. (Nothing like your $10 million missile falling for a quick chaff.)
missiles welded themselves to the mount
The hardpoints and ejector racks used on today's planes are unlikely to be susceptible to suddenly welding themselves in place. (Assuming that they're even close enough to the deck to worry about an accidental arc-weld.) Future Naval aircraft (e.g. F-35) will carry their primary ordinance inside an internal weapons bay, further reducing the exposure to accidental arcs.
Has anyone ACTUALLY seen someone in REAL LIFE with an iPhone?
Four off the top of my head. Three coworkers and a friend from Canada. (He unlocked it to work with Rogers.) I could probably come up with more if I thought hard enough about it.
In comparison, everyone I know who had a Windows Mobile phone ended up drop-kicking it and replacing with just a plain-jane phone. Biggest complaint? "At least I can make calls on this phone. Which is more than I can say for my Windows phone..."
There's a bit of a difference between a sub-sonic launch of a warhead over the distance of a couple miles vs. a Mach 8 launch over hundreds of miles over the horizon.;-)
Yeah, I got that part. What I mean is: I have no idea how an "advanced" arresting gear differs from a "regular" arresting gear. i.e. The navy isn't saying. It's just... advanced.:-P
It's all fun and games until someone decides to make a nuclear-capable artillery shell for this thing.
There are some serious problems to mounting a nuclear munition on this sucker. First off, the weight of the round currently being fired is actually quite small. The weapon would need to be scaled up by many, many fold just to fire the nuclear munition.
Second, no existing type of warhead would survive the shock of launch. A gun-type device would detonate on launch. (NOT good.) An implosion device requires that the plates surrounding the charges that surround the plutonium core be carefully calibrated. A single charge or plate out of place and the bomb will fizzle out. Advanced hydrogen weapons are out as well, as they require an atomic explosion as a trigger. Plus, the cores of hydrogen bombs need to be kept even more precisely in place in relation to the uranium shell of the weapon.
All in all, the only thing you'd accomplish by combining a rail gun with a nuclear warhead is to either blow yourself up or damage your highly-expensive-bomb-that-could-have-been-more-easily-deployed-with-a-super-sonic-missile.
The DDX Destroyer is just the first step in the Navy's futurization of the fleet. The CVNX project intends to modernize carriers in the same way that the DDX Destroyers will be modernized.
Some of the features:
Better, more powerful reactors (3x increase in available power!)
Stealth
Electromagnetic catapults
Greater automation leading to reduced crew complement
Better survivability in a fight (like that's been a big concern:P)
Advanced arresting gear (no idea what that means)
Dual Band Radar support
"Flexible ship infrastructure" (i.e. We can mount some kewl energy weapons once Congress gives us the green.)
The Enterprise was the prototype. Plus, Nimtz carriers only have 2 reactors. So it wouldn't surprise me if they overengineered her power supply for the intent purpose of mounting experimental weapons.
That being said, the Nimtz reactors are a bit more advanced than the Enterprise (lessons learned and all that), so that has a lot to do with the reduction in the number of reactors.
Everything beyond that is classified. I could tell you, but then I'd have to shoot you. (Assuming that I already knew and therefore had been shot.:P)
hydrogen has a different octane than gasoline (so does ethanol by the way), so both require a modified (more expensive) engine.
Hydrogen requires more significant changes to the engine. That's what drives up the price. Ethanol only requires shifts in the timing and better fuel lines to handle the corrosive effects of the Ethanol, thus making it a fairly inexpensive conversion. Flex vehicles are able to detect information about the fuel and adjust the timing of the engine.
As for your next point, both hydrogen and ethanol require new infrastructure if they are to replace oil.
That's a fair point, but I think you overestimate the amount of new infrastructure needed by ethanol vs. that needed by hydrogen. We have methods of building pipelines that can handle ethanol. What we DON'T have is a consensus on how to produce, store, transport, or even fuel hydrogen vehicles. Which leaves a rather massive infrastructure gap between ethanol and hydrogen. Ethanol requires some behind-the-scenes changes. No real biggie. Hydrogen requires brand new vehicles, brand new storage systems, brand new transportation methods*, and brand new production methods. We simply aren't ready to build this infrastructure, no matter how much I wish we were.
They only reason they haven't taken off is because ignorant Americans (yes, I'm an American too) have a stupid idea that diesel is dirty technology.
It's not a stupid idea. Up until 2006, the US allowed really crappy quality diesel to be sold on the fuel market. This reduced the pump cost of the fuel, but meant that it was extremely dirty and bad for the environment. There was no way that car makers could create cars that burned these fuels clean enough to meet emission standards. Thus the disappearance of diesel in small vehicles. From Wikipedia:
In contrast, the United States has long had "dirtier" diesel, although more stringent emission standards have been adopted with the transition to ULSD starting in 2006 and becoming mandatory on June 1, 2010 (see also diesel exhaust). U.S. diesel fuel typically also has a lower cetane number (a measure of ignition quality) than European diesel, resulting in worse cold weather performance and some increase in emissions. This is one reason why U.S. drivers of large trucks idle their rigs all night rather than risking a cold-weather start.
In fact, the only reason why ethanol is taking off is because it's a fairly good additive to gasoline to increase the octane rating
That's been true for decades. As a former resident of Wisconsin, I can tell you that nearly all fuel sold in that state used Ethanol as an octane booster, with many pumping stations advertising as much as "10% Ethanol". What's changed is that ethanol is now being blended in at higher quantities while car makers rush to support these "new" fuels. For the first time in my life, I'm actually seeing E85 fuels pop up at your average, everyday gas station. So no, ethanol is not being driven by its use as an octane booster. Your information is out of date.
(* Hydrogen leaks out of nearly any container. That's one of the reasons why it's so hard to transport and store.)
Studies conducted since the late 1970s have estimated the net energy value (NEV) of corn ethanol. However, variations in data and assumptions used among the studies have resulted in a wide range of estimates. This study identifies the factors causing this wide variation and develops a more consistent estimate. We conclude that the NEV of corn ethanol has been rising over time due to technological advances in ethanol conversion and increased efficiency in farm production. We show that corn ethanol is energy efficient as indicated by an energy output:input ratio of 1.34. --July 2002
"Ethanol production in the United States does not benefit the nation's energy security, its agriculture, the economy, or the environment," according to the study by Cornell's David Pimentel and Berkeley's Tad Patzek.
Oh lookie. David Pimentel. What a shocker.:-/
I think you'll find that energy-negative studies not conducted by Pimentel himself invariably contain a "Special Thanks to David Pimentel for providing data." Nice, eh?
The nice thing about ethanol is that continued research is almost guaranteed to drive down the price-per-energy cost by orders of magnitudes
That's true of most technologies. e.g. If we were to embrace hydrogen, I can guarantee that the price of hydrogen fuels would drop like a rock over time.
The real beauty of ethanol is that it is similar enough to gasoline to make it a viable alternative for powering existing engine designs. Which means that the massive investments made in the modern, overdesigned, otto-cycle piston engine can continue to be leveraged while new engine technologies are developed.
In short: Hydrogen would require an entirely new infrastructure. Ethanol would not. Which is a huge win for ethanol.
I was mostly being snarky, but I suppose it's only fair to draw that out into a complete thought. The key issue with ethanol production is not that we can't grow the crops, it's that we don't have enough demand yet. If there was massive demand for high-sugar plants, farmers would be looking to grow them as high-profit crops rather than growing excessive amounts of corn. To date, however, these crops have been mostly processed into sugar, which is not quite as in high of demand as automobile fuel.
A lot of the focus on corn as a source for ethanol stems from an existing investment and overproduction of the crop. This availability makes some economic sense as the market wouldn't have to work so hard to close the gap between the potential supply and demand. For a proto-industry, keeping that gap small means that prices can be kept at affordable levels.
That being said, if ethanol took off there is a good chance that you'd see foreign fields being purchased by American interests. Which would make us less directly dependent on these countries for their exports. American technology, money, and skills would pour into these areas to increase production to meet our needs. Much in the way that factories are currently outsourced around the world.
Thus the solution to the problem would arrive on not just one, but many fronts. Some internal, some external, but nearly all directly controlled and protected by American* ownership, treaties, money, and interests.
(* The EU may have similar interests given their high petrol costs. I only speak to American interests because those are the interests I am most familiar with. None the less, it wouldn't surprise me if the EU started looking to India and parts of Asia to reduce their own fuel costs.)
(** Note that there is one downside to using food products as fuel. The high demand for fuels would be likely to reduce American exports of food crops. This reduction could have a negative impact on the food supply of the rest of the world, as well as further widen the U.S. trade deficit.)
Correct. Unfortunately, the current refinement processes still result in a more costly product per unit of energy than petroleum. Gasoline prices are close to making ethanol affordable, but not quite. The advantage to this process is that it would make ethanol cheaply. A result that is far more desirable than pure efficiency. If it's highly efficient in the end, all the better.:-)
BTW, Pimentel still disagrees that ethanol is energy positive. He's really just being a jerk, pushing data that's nearly 30 years old. Not a single study that's independent of his numbers has shown the same results. The only problem is that there are enough gullible people who listen to him.:-/
we could get 2% efficiency, but if we're getting it cheap, that's all that matters, right?
Yes.
The efficiency argument as it pertains to ethanol is related to the so-called "energy positive" problem. The concern is that if it takes more energy to create the ethanol than it does to farm it and convert it to fuel, then what exactly is powering all that farm equipment? It can't be the ethanol, or we'd eventually run out of energy.
On the other hand, grid power consolidates the power infrastructure and therefore is wonderfully inexpensive. If this machine did nothing more than take grid power and convert it straight into ethanol, it would be a miracle machine. It's almost as good as if you had a machine that converted uranium or plutonium directly into millions of barrels of ethanol. If you get a slight boost from the energy already stored in the corn, so much the better!
The key thing (economically) is to get off of oil. Oil is starting to weigh down our economy and gives far too much power to current and potential enemies. Making transportation cheap again would rebound the economy, bring food prices back in line, and generally improve things for the U.S. (and really, the rest of the world) all around.:-)
what kind of development shop doesn't worry about their applications scaling?
Oh, perhaps the kind that provide exclusive or small-reach services? e.g. If I ran a local salon, how many people would reasonably be hitting my site simultaneously? I might not be able to afford to have someone build me a scalable J2EE online-appointment system, but I could probably afford a small Ruby on Rails site. Scalability for my site would be handled by throwing hardware at the problem, as it's a LOT cheaper in this case than trying to pay for a massive development effort.
And if my site is well and truly straining under the load applies to it (for a single-shop salon!) then I've got a lot bigger problem with over-booked schedule than with my technology.
To carry that example one step further, I would probably look at opening new locations to solve my overbooking problem. Each location could get its own scheduling system on a different subdomain, thereby solving my issues for the near future. If I manage to get so popular as to need a unified solution, then it's probably time to rearchitect the technology AND the business to meet the demand. (As good as we programmers like to think of ourselves, we can't possibly predict the issues that will be involved in such a changeover to the extent to where we can deliver the original solution with that sort of adaptability in mind while still doing it inexpensively.)
Seriously, you're picking at an example where I say that some small company somewhere might benefit from the faster development time of Ruby over the advantages of Java? Especially when said company probably doesn't need the same level of scalability you're worried about?
Slashdot Mirror
The sales argument is irrelevant, I'm afraid. If you chart the size of the video game market as a whole it has grown at a rather fast clip with each generation of console. Because the market grows with each successive generation, the sales numbers alone cannot tell the entire story.
And despite that, they have a strong reverence for the NES generation. Whether they were directly introduced to it or not, the concepts like "Power Glove", the original Super Mario Bros., Zelda, the Zapper, the 2 button gamepad, and other Nintendo-isms are etched into our cultural memory.
In comparison, the lasting culture of the Playstation is elusive at best. The players that don't remember the NES associate Final Fantasy with the Playstation. Same with Metal Gear. And that's about it. The console itself is not viewed as iconic, people do not do remixes of the music from Crash Bandicoot, no one remembers the controller prior to the Dual Shock, and no one has bothered to create PSX clones of the console as has been done with the NES.
Don't believe me? Check it out:
http://www.amazon.com/Console-Plays-Nintendo-Super-Games/dp/B000L4Y5IS
http://www.amazon.com/Messiah-Entertainment-M083-Generation-Videogame/dp/B000QT6I42/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1201637753&sr=1-1
Take it from an amateur video game historian. The impact of the NES has been felt by the market since the day it was introduced. Its relevance is just as strong today as it was then. The PSX made no lasting contribution to the market or our culture, and was all but forgotten when the next generation rolled around.
It's not nostalgia. I'm an avid collector of classic consoles and I can tell you from both history and the consoles sitting in my living room that the Playstation's impact was nowhere near that of the NES. The majority of the games for the PSX were, in fact, quite poor. The achievement of the Playstation was that it succeeded where the 3DO and the CD-i failed. It brought a standard multimedia computer platform* to the market in the form of a console, and succeeded in providing a "standard" base for developers to work from.
From a market perspective, it built heavily on the market that Nintendo and Sega had already built. Had the Playstation been introduced in the wake of the market crash it would have never succeeded. Instead, the market was already excited about the possibility of a multimedia console that catered to all ages. The Playstation was the first to deliver the right mixture of technology to meet demand, ergo it won by default.
* A multimedia computer platform at the time was considered a computer with a sound card, high resolution graphics, mpeg decoding, and a CD-ROM drive. Bit of a misnomer in modern terms, but it was high-tech stuff back then.
Actually, both are correct. Various aspects of Super Mario came from his trips into the woods (e.g. Miyamoto would daydream about climbing a tree high enough to get above the clouds, finding a magical castle, etc.), while the game of Zelda was more of a direct translation of his exploration of the woods and caves around his home. To tie it all together, Miyamoto basically had a very active imagination that he was able to translate into the games he designed. The latter part is a rare gift that is what made him so successful.
The Playstation was definitely not the greatest console of all time. Its philosophy was, "Let's throw a bunch of crud against the wall and see what sticks." As a standardized platform for home entertainment it was highly successful. (In part, due to the low cost of its CD media.) However, if you want to actually look at a system that captured the hearts and minds of the market, the NES is probably IT.
The NES drug the console market out of a complete collapse into a thriving and expansive market. The quality was kept reasonably high through careful controls on the number of games that could be produced by each licensee. (To prevent the "game dumping" problem that occurred in the Atari generation.) It set the stage for the modern video game market, brought the arcade home in ways that even the Colecovision couldn't, introduced the idea of story-driven action games rather than arcade console games, reorganized the market around a control scheme that lives on even today (i.e. the venerable gamepad), and is fondly remembered by nearly every generation of gamer.
There simply has never been a console that has had the impact on the market that the original NES had. In its time it was without equal. I love the SNES as well, but the title for the "greatest" always has been and always will be on the NES.
Well, Rome had ~500 years of tyranny, followed by ~1000 years of a split and crumbling empire with poor living conditions, rampant disease, hunger, and incredibly short lifespans. Soo... guess what? You're dead either way. Better to take a stand while you still can than wafting on a hope that "Rome will be a Republic once again! Someday. Soon. Maybe."
Of course, your rather dire attitude towards the US places your objectivity about the current political situation in question. I can guarantee you that things are not quite as bad as you're making them out to be. If the US crumbles, it will be more through ambivalence and poor maintenance than tyranny.
The first thought that comes to my mind is Rome. Once it slipped into the control of Julius Caesar, it never recovered. The Roman Republic was long lost to the tyranny of the Roman Empire. The end result was a complete collapse of Rome itself, a loss of world infrastructure, and a completely separate empire (the Byzantines) which was eventually overthrown by the Crusades and later the Ottomans.
1. Military hardware is EMP shielded. This is to prevent enemies from taking out our multi-trillion dollar war infrastructure with a simple electronic overload.
2. Autopilot? Off the deck of a carrier? That's not the Spartan way, that's just madness!
I don't think any jets do manual takeoffs from a carrier. (Unless you count VTOL craft like the Harrier Jumpjet.) The fighters are always launched to force them to clear the deck at takeoff speed. Planes that are too large for the launchers will tend to use JATO rockets to gain enough velocity by the end of the runway. Here's an image of modern carrier launch and recovery operations. It's dicey business WITH two operational catapults and arresting wires. As a result, not many pilots are willing to attempt an unlaunched flight off the deck of a carrier. Take a helicopter or a boat instead.
Lord help whoever mounts flammable magnesium on the deck of an aircraft carrier. The Admirals would make his head roll so far he'd make a trip to Pluto and back just so the Admirals could kick it again!
When magnesium is used as a construction material, it's almost always alloyed with other metals to prevent this exact problem. The alloy reduces the ignition point to ranges where you're actually more concerned about aluminum combustion.
Weapons on deck are treated VERY carefully. All ordinance on-deck have safety pins in them that must be removed just before takeoff. This is to prevent accidental detonation. Ordinance is also hardened a bit to withstand the rigors of combat flight as well as enemy countermeasures. (Nothing like your $10 million missile falling for a quick chaff.)
The hardpoints and ejector racks used on today's planes are unlikely to be susceptible to suddenly welding themselves in place. (Assuming that they're even close enough to the deck to worry about an accidental arc-weld.) Future Naval aircraft (e.g. F-35) will carry their primary ordinance inside an internal weapons bay, further reducing the exposure to accidental arcs.
Four off the top of my head. Three coworkers and a friend from Canada. (He unlocked it to work with Rogers.) I could probably come up with more if I thought hard enough about it.
In comparison, everyone I know who had a Windows Mobile phone ended up drop-kicking it and replacing with just a plain-jane phone. Biggest complaint? "At least I can make calls on this phone. Which is more than I can say for my Windows phone..."
*cough* harbor... *cough*
There's a bit of a difference between a sub-sonic launch of a warhead over the distance of a couple miles vs. a Mach 8 launch over hundreds of miles over the horizon. ;-)
Yeah, I got that part. What I mean is: I have no idea how an "advanced" arresting gear differs from a "regular" arresting gear. i.e. The navy isn't saying. It's just... advanced. :-P
There are some serious problems to mounting a nuclear munition on this sucker. First off, the weight of the round currently being fired is actually quite small. The weapon would need to be scaled up by many, many fold just to fire the nuclear munition.
Second, no existing type of warhead would survive the shock of launch. A gun-type device would detonate on launch. (NOT good.) An implosion device requires that the plates surrounding the charges that surround the plutonium core be carefully calibrated. A single charge or plate out of place and the bomb will fizzle out. Advanced hydrogen weapons are out as well, as they require an atomic explosion as a trigger. Plus, the cores of hydrogen bombs need to be kept even more precisely in place in relation to the uranium shell of the weapon.
All in all, the only thing you'd accomplish by combining a rail gun with a nuclear warhead is to either blow yourself up or damage your highly-expensive-bomb-that-could-have-been-more-easily-deployed-with-a-super-sonic-missile.
Some of the features:
Navy Fact File
As I recall, the original list of superweapons was much more impressive. It just got pared back a smidge when Congress balked at the price tag.
The Enterprise was the prototype. Plus, Nimtz carriers only have 2 reactors. So it wouldn't surprise me if they overengineered her power supply for the intent purpose of mounting experimental weapons.
:P)
That being said, the Nimtz reactors are a bit more advanced than the Enterprise (lessons learned and all that), so that has a lot to do with the reduction in the number of reactors.
Everything beyond that is classified. I could tell you, but then I'd have to shoot you. (Assuming that I already knew and therefore had been shot.
Hydrogen requires more significant changes to the engine. That's what drives up the price. Ethanol only requires shifts in the timing and better fuel lines to handle the corrosive effects of the Ethanol, thus making it a fairly inexpensive conversion. Flex vehicles are able to detect information about the fuel and adjust the timing of the engine.
That's a fair point, but I think you overestimate the amount of new infrastructure needed by ethanol vs. that needed by hydrogen. We have methods of building pipelines that can handle ethanol. What we DON'T have is a consensus on how to produce, store, transport, or even fuel hydrogen vehicles. Which leaves a rather massive infrastructure gap between ethanol and hydrogen. Ethanol requires some behind-the-scenes changes. No real biggie. Hydrogen requires brand new vehicles, brand new storage systems, brand new transportation methods*, and brand new production methods. We simply aren't ready to build this infrastructure, no matter how much I wish we were.
It's not a stupid idea. Up until 2006, the US allowed really crappy quality diesel to be sold on the fuel market. This reduced the pump cost of the fuel, but meant that it was extremely dirty and bad for the environment. There was no way that car makers could create cars that burned these fuels clean enough to meet emission standards. Thus the disappearance of diesel in small vehicles. From Wikipedia:
That's been true for decades. As a former resident of Wisconsin, I can tell you that nearly all fuel sold in that state used Ethanol as an octane booster, with many pumping stations advertising as much as "10% Ethanol". What's changed is that ethanol is now being blended in at higher quantities while car makers rush to support these "new" fuels. For the first time in my life, I'm actually seeing E85 fuels pop up at your average, everyday gas station. So no, ethanol is not being driven by its use as an octane booster. Your information is out of date.
(* Hydrogen leaks out of nearly any container. That's one of the reasons why it's so hard to transport and store.)
Such as? Every recent government study I've seen says the exact opposite.
e.g. The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol: An Update:
What you're probably thinking of is sensationalist headlines like this: Study says ethanol not worth the energy
Oh lookie. David Pimentel. What a shocker.
I think you'll find that energy-negative studies not conducted by Pimentel himself invariably contain a "Special Thanks to David Pimentel for providing data." Nice, eh?
That's true of most technologies. e.g. If we were to embrace hydrogen, I can guarantee that the price of hydrogen fuels would drop like a rock over time.
The real beauty of ethanol is that it is similar enough to gasoline to make it a viable alternative for powering existing engine designs. Which means that the massive investments made in the modern, overdesigned, otto-cycle piston engine can continue to be leveraged while new engine technologies are developed.
In short: Hydrogen would require an entirely new infrastructure. Ethanol would not. Which is a huge win for ethanol.
I was mostly being snarky, but I suppose it's only fair to draw that out into a complete thought. The key issue with ethanol production is not that we can't grow the crops, it's that we don't have enough demand yet. If there was massive demand for high-sugar plants, farmers would be looking to grow them as high-profit crops rather than growing excessive amounts of corn. To date, however, these crops have been mostly processed into sugar, which is not quite as in high of demand as automobile fuel.
A lot of the focus on corn as a source for ethanol stems from an existing investment and overproduction of the crop. This availability makes some economic sense as the market wouldn't have to work so hard to close the gap between the potential supply and demand. For a proto-industry, keeping that gap small means that prices can be kept at affordable levels.
That being said, if ethanol took off there is a good chance that you'd see foreign fields being purchased by American interests. Which would make us less directly dependent on these countries for their exports. American technology, money, and skills would pour into these areas to increase production to meet our needs. Much in the way that factories are currently outsourced around the world.
Thus the solution to the problem would arrive on not just one, but many fronts. Some internal, some external, but nearly all directly controlled and protected by American* ownership, treaties, money, and interests.
(* The EU may have similar interests given their high petrol costs. I only speak to American interests because those are the interests I am most familiar with. None the less, it wouldn't surprise me if the EU started looking to India and parts of Asia to reduce their own fuel costs.)
(** Note that there is one downside to using food products as fuel. The high demand for fuels would be likely to reduce American exports of food crops. This reduction could have a negative impact on the food supply of the rest of the world, as well as further widen the U.S. trade deficit.)
Correct. Unfortunately, the current refinement processes still result in a more costly product per unit of energy than petroleum. Gasoline prices are close to making ethanol affordable, but not quite. The advantage to this process is that it would make ethanol cheaply. A result that is far more desirable than pure efficiency. If it's highly efficient in the end, all the better. :-)
:-/
BTW, Pimentel still disagrees that ethanol is energy positive. He's really just being a jerk, pushing data that's nearly 30 years old. Not a single study that's independent of his numbers has shown the same results. The only problem is that there are enough gullible people who listen to him.
Yeah! Places like Florida, Hawaii, Lousiana, and Texas! Don't even get me started on the strange places that Sugar Beets come from!
Yes.
The efficiency argument as it pertains to ethanol is related to the so-called "energy positive" problem. The concern is that if it takes more energy to create the ethanol than it does to farm it and convert it to fuel, then what exactly is powering all that farm equipment? It can't be the ethanol, or we'd eventually run out of energy.
On the other hand, grid power consolidates the power infrastructure and therefore is wonderfully inexpensive. If this machine did nothing more than take grid power and convert it straight into ethanol, it would be a miracle machine. It's almost as good as if you had a machine that converted uranium or plutonium directly into millions of barrels of ethanol. If you get a slight boost from the energy already stored in the corn, so much the better!
The key thing (economically) is to get off of oil. Oil is starting to weigh down our economy and gives far too much power to current and potential enemies. Making transportation cheap again would rebound the economy, bring food prices back in line, and generally improve things for the U.S. (and really, the rest of the world) all around.
Oh, perhaps the kind that provide exclusive or small-reach services? e.g. If I ran a local salon, how many people would reasonably be hitting my site simultaneously? I might not be able to afford to have someone build me a scalable J2EE online-appointment system, but I could probably afford a small Ruby on Rails site. Scalability for my site would be handled by throwing hardware at the problem, as it's a LOT cheaper in this case than trying to pay for a massive development effort.
And if my site is well and truly straining under the load applies to it (for a single-shop salon!) then I've got a lot bigger problem with over-booked schedule than with my technology.
To carry that example one step further, I would probably look at opening new locations to solve my overbooking problem. Each location could get its own scheduling system on a different subdomain, thereby solving my issues for the near future. If I manage to get so popular as to need a unified solution, then it's probably time to rearchitect the technology AND the business to meet the demand. (As good as we programmers like to think of ourselves, we can't possibly predict the issues that will be involved in such a changeover to the extent to where we can deliver the original solution with that sort of adaptability in mind while still doing it inexpensively.)
I call overreaction!
:-/
Seriously, you're picking at an example where I say that some small company somewhere might benefit from the faster development time of Ruby over the advantages of Java? Especially when said company probably doesn't need the same level of scalability you're worried about?
Geez. Simmer down, will ya?
They also restored a lot of the lost data. Something which Charter is completely incapable of.
The irony? Slashdot dove into 503 and 500 errors a few minutes after you posted that.