No, EMP does not mean he looses. Cars are fairly resistant to EMP based on recent testing. Some (not all) cars may be upset by an EMP enough to stop running, but nearly 100% of them will run just fine when restarted. Most of the damage will be done by the accidents caused by the cars that stop running.
Yea, I know.. You need some evidence.. I'm looking in my spare time.
No, the truth is that it is exceptionally easy, when trying to be cheap, to not engineer the proper safety into your power supply design and manufacturing process. If a hot lead from the power plug finds itself connected to the device ground (i.e. the case) then any grounded person that touches the phone will be in trouble. So this is not a function of Apple's design.
Um.. Easy. If you "Plug into the wall" and then don't do the right things in your power supply design, then it is possible to put full AC voltage on things the customer might touch. This is even more true for modern "switching" supply designs which don't make use of a transformer to step down the voltage. It would be extremely easy to connect the phone's "ground" (i.e. the case) to an input power lead and kill a customer who tries to handle the charging phone while otherwise grounded (In the tub, Bare feet in a puddle, touching some plumbing fixture etc.) . Such faults would not keep the charger from working.
A further complicating factor is that your charger made for the US market, may also work (with the proper adapters) in other places. This means that a specific design may be totally safe in the US, but be a death trap elsewhere, or be totally safe overseas but totally unsafe in North America.
Because of this, it's usually best to play it safe and use only power adapters designed and sold by companies in your own country. The cheap knockoffs you can get on E-Bay can be dangerous, and you would not know it until it was too late.
I think you are partially correct... This is certainly a ploy to get more budget, only it's not for drones, it's for attracting and keeping pilots... No Really, pilots.
Drones are not THE answer for the conflicts that the Air Force faces. Drones (and fighters for that matter) are but a fraction of the Air Force's budget. They are really saying what they need.. Money to train and retain pilots..
Sure... Getting shot at by all manner of ground, sea and air based weapons while flying very close to other aircraft and the ground is what fighter pilots do. All of this is dangerous.
Fighter pilot business is dangerous and many pilots die. But does that make the aircraft they fly bad? I don't think so. Have some aircraft proved to be more difficult to fly than others? Yes, but usually the Air Force is able to alter their tactics and procedures to mitigate any issues. They train better to avoid dying because the handled the aircraft incorrectly and fly missions in ways that suit their aircraft better.
So are fighters death traps? Not really, unless you don't have enough skill or performance to out fly your adversary. THEN I'd call them death traps.
Well.. An observed 20M rise in sea level back then certainly was NOT because fossil fuels got burned. Which leads to the question, What DID cause it? Which leads us to the question, so how do we know what's happening now? Theories abound, but there is little proof of much of what gets asserted as true in the press. Just tells us we need to keep looking at the issue because we apparently don't fully understand it yet.
That was a long time before the bronze age.. Nobody was burning fossil fuels and dumping CO2 into the air. SO.... How does something like this happen? Can you believe there is some kind of natural process that we don't yet understand going on?
Problem with all of this is that if the process cycles are in the millions of years, it's going to be impossible to really know if your models are accurate because you only have a few thousand years of recorded history to validate your models with. Plus, you don't know if the system has been disturbed by some outside forces, say a meteor strike (think meteor crater) or volcanic eruption.
Interesting evidence guys, please keep looking into this..
Oh don't start with the facts here.... You know how these things get reported by the press. Appeal to the emotion, quote the statistical "it's possible" and go out and find the one or two odd bad outcomes from taking the vaccine and you can get parents around the world to demand that THEIR child not get vaccinated.
I personally know of a young girl who's life was ruined by a bad reaction to a vaccine, but my children where vaccinated anyway. The statistics do NOT lie about this. The medical studies are clear that vaccines are safe and effective or they will NOT be used. Unless they are less risky than the illness they treat, no doctor in his right mind would give them.
Parents.... Do the right thing and do the vaccines recommended by your doctors. Chances are it's going to be better for your child..
Yea, I used to get some serious heat in my old VW Bug that came off the exhaust manifold. You could roast hot dogs with that heater and still be freezing because the door seals let so much cold air in. I had it melt a CD I'd thrown in the back seat once while freezing though Illinois one winter. It was 20 below out and I was freezing, except for the scorch marks on my left ankle and shoe. The poor CD was on the floor right where the hot air came out under the back seat.
Without going too deep into a lesson on thermodynamics, there is not going to be much chance that this works in a modern power station.
Let me put it this way. Current power stations are already engineered to be as efficient as possible. This generally means they are keeping the phase translations of the working liquid using the minimum temperature differentials possible to avoid entropy loss over the ideal Carnot cycle. Any thermally driven power producing device put in series with the heat exchangers is not likely to capture any more power than will be lost by the increased temperature differential required by the device. If this wasn't true, why don't we just attach a boat load of sterling heat engines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine) to do the same thing? Reason: It wreaks the efficiency of the power plant by making the temperature differentials higher.. Chances are this new idea has the same problem.
Now, on your car, or other internal combustion engines, there *might* be some application, but I don't think there will be enough power output to make up for the weight increase. There is a HUGE amount of waste heat from your car engine but the question is how efficiently can we capture that and make useful energy out of it? Answer: Not very... Worth looking at because of the amount of heat being just dumped and the high differential temperatures but not likely to be much gain overall.
I don't think this is an issue. Most batteries are not made of compressible materials or materials that have low boiling points so I seriously doubt that the pressure changes experienced during normal commercial flights are a problem. Now if you have a battery with air pockets or fluids that boil easily, you might have a concern. I don't think any of this is true for LiIon batteries. If there was a concern, I'm sure Boeing was required to demonstrate that their batteries where capable of taking the pressure changes.
Oh I'm not seriously concerned about some kind of issue popping up in the system from time to time. Stuff happens and it's hard to foresee how everything is going to work out over time. Sometimes you just cannot see how things will wear or that the margin for error wasn't quite as good as we thought.
But this airplane has MULTIPLE issues cropping up and we just don't have many flight hours and time in service to justify this many. The evidence is mounting that Boeing may have cut too many corners on this one trying to deliver on a too aggressive schedule at too low of a cost.
Seems that Boeing has a serious problem with recurring issues on the 787 dreamliner. First the three battery fires, now with the rear electronics bay catching fire twice now.
I sure hope the two incidents are NOT related or the FAA is going to have to pull these aircraft out of service again. That would be very bad given we've spent about the same time grounded as actually in service.
Ahhh... Where is the APU in this thing? I'm thinking that they usually are in the tail in large aircraft, but I'm just a software engineer not a pilot or avionics engineer.
APU in tail puts a lot of electrical cables, hot air ducts and fuel lines along side control cables, hydraulic lines and such. APU's provide ground power and air conditioning, compressed air for engine starting along with electrical power. There is a large power distribution infrastructure just under where the fire seems to have caused a problem.
Right... An operative from Airbus commuted arson while is sat on the tarmac?
This plane is having a pretty bumpy start. Years late, an inflight fire during testing, some serious smoking battery issues that got it grounded for months and now this? This does not bode well for Boeing's dream aircraft. The problem here is that unlike most of Boeing's previous aircraft launches, the 787 is having some shockingly serious problems crop up. I think the evidence is mounting that they cut a few to many corners in their bid to cut weight and cost. Hopefully they can pull this together but as the number and seriousness of the issues stack up it starts looking less and less likely.
Seems the dream is turning into a nightmare.... A really hot and smokey nightmare. If the flying public looses confidence in the aircraft or it gets grounded again for months, this is going to be really bad for the company.
You will not be able to do this in a communications limited environment. What you describe requires high bandwidth and fairly low latency communications paths in both directions. These paths will need to make at least one RF hop (ground to aircraft) so they are subject to disruption by the bad guys. The more aircraft you have in an area, the more bandwidth and RF links you will need. The more bandwidth you need, the easier it is to disrupt your communications.
So, unless you know the bad guys can't disrupt your RF links AND you can operate enough of these aircraft in the desired area without having them interfere with each other your expensive unmanned aircraft are unable to perform the mission.
Jamming equipment is easily obtained and cheap. It is not that technically challenging to improvise really effective jamming capacity from common consumer electronic devices and it's not much harder to design and build systems that could at least degrade most communications in small areas. Jamming capacity is well within the means of most states (and a lot of stateless groups) we may be in conflict with.
We still need manned machines. Manned systems are capable, even in communications denied environments where UAV's cannot effectively operate. Should we be investing in UAV's? Sure, but we should be investing in manned systems right along side them.
If you can pre-plan everything, a drone works great in a communications denied environment, usually. If you want or need to have human interaction with a drone to adjust the plan for changing conditions then you have a problem in a communications denied environment. If your drone uses GPS for navigation even, you have a SERIOUS problem if your enemy has fairly low tech equipment that can jam or spoof GPS.
Denying (jamming) communications or GPS is not technically difficult. It may be a bit beyond the enemy in the currently active conflicts, but it's a fool who doesn't look at the geopolitical situation and see that it is well within the capabilities of 95% of the rest of the world. Even North Korea could disable communications and prevent communications with drones in their airspace and they are pretty much third world.
So do we just start buying unnamed aircraft and expect that they can take care of things for us? I think that idea is stupid. We had better keep a man in the machine for at least some of what we buy.
I'm going to have to disagree with you because there simply are things that a manned aircraft can do that simply cannot be done by a remotely piloted one.
Sure, you can tell something to go fly over there and blow up that spot or even program it to go find a specific target you can define well enough that a computer can find the desired target. Cruse missiles are GREAT stand off weapons and we've been doing this kind of thing for years, albeit in a pretty expensive way. We've vastly improved on such weapons since the V2 of WW2.
But, you are going to need a man in the loop when attacking multiple kinds of targets or targets that move. An example would be close air support of ground troops. There is no way you are going to be as effective flying CAS missions when the pilot is multiple satellite hops delayed or be able to properly plan an ingress route, weapon release point, target location and egress route, upload it as quickly as a pilot in the aircraft can.
But, I think the issue really is communications. If your planning to do more than launch a cruse missile and forget it, you are going to need to communicate with your fleet of drones so you can at least task them. If you want to get video or stills from the drones so you can actually take a look at what you are shooting at, that takes lots of bandwidth. All this has latency requirements too. The more you have the man in the loop, the more bandwidth, lower bit error rates and lower latency your communications have to be. However, communications links are both hard to establish and even harder to maintain, especially if your adversaries are even slightly technologically capable. Jamming data links is not that hard.
If you communicate with the drone (and a lot of useful missions require bi-directional communications) then stealth is out the window. Why bother with stealth aircraft if you put a RF transmitter on board? It's like trying to hide a lighthouse at night..
Manned aircraft don't suffer from the communications issue. You can explain to a pilot what you want him to do, send him up in an armed aircraft and wait for him to come back. He can manage the task if the target moves or shows up in the wrong place. He can react to unforeseen circumstances and modify how he executes his task and still achieve the goals. You don't have to watch what he's doing to make sure the mission continues and you don't have to talk to him along the way. You can send him in a stealth aircraft and not need to put a RF source on it too.
Manned aircraft, fighters, bombers and the rest are going to be around a long time yet. Just like autopilots haven't done away with pilots, drones will not do away with them either. Sure, there are special cases where drones are good solutions, but manned aircraft are here to stay.
It just doesn't stop them from parting out the thing. Removing the SSD, memory and such is a quickly done. Common laptop repair parts, (screens, keyboards, batteries, chargers and even processors) are usually not that hard to remove. Remember, the thief just wants a quick buck,. It doesn't matter to them what the thing retails for, they will just sell what they can and trash the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.survivalblog.com/2010/08/real_world_emp_effects_on_moto.html
No, EMP does not mean he looses. Cars are fairly resistant to EMP based on recent testing. Some (not all) cars may be upset by an EMP enough to stop running, but nearly 100% of them will run just fine when restarted. Most of the damage will be done by the accidents caused by the cars that stop running.
Yea, I know.. You need some evidence.. I'm looking in my spare time.
No
No, the truth is that it is exceptionally easy, when trying to be cheap, to not engineer the proper safety into your power supply design and manufacturing process. If a hot lead from the power plug finds itself connected to the device ground (i.e. the case) then any grounded person that touches the phone will be in trouble. So this is not a function of Apple's design.
Um.. Easy. If you "Plug into the wall" and then don't do the right things in your power supply design, then it is possible to put full AC voltage on things the customer might touch. This is even more true for modern "switching" supply designs which don't make use of a transformer to step down the voltage. It would be extremely easy to connect the phone's "ground" (i.e. the case) to an input power lead and kill a customer who tries to handle the charging phone while otherwise grounded (In the tub, Bare feet in a puddle, touching some plumbing fixture etc.) . Such faults would not keep the charger from working.
A further complicating factor is that your charger made for the US market, may also work (with the proper adapters) in other places. This means that a specific design may be totally safe in the US, but be a death trap elsewhere, or be totally safe overseas but totally unsafe in North America.
Because of this, it's usually best to play it safe and use only power adapters designed and sold by companies in your own country. The cheap knockoffs you can get on E-Bay can be dangerous, and you would not know it until it was too late.
That's just shocking! Oh wait....
Thinking about the blue glow given off as prompt neutrons slow down gives a whole new meaning to "Blue Screen of Death".
Can we make sure Bill does a better job testing his new product this time.... Please?
Will it run on windows with the metro interface?
I think you are partially correct... This is certainly a ploy to get more budget, only it's not for drones, it's for attracting and keeping pilots... No Really, pilots.
Drones are not THE answer for the conflicts that the Air Force faces. Drones (and fighters for that matter) are but a fraction of the Air Force's budget. They are really saying what they need.. Money to train and retain pilots..
Sure... Getting shot at by all manner of ground, sea and air based weapons while flying very close to other aircraft and the ground is what fighter pilots do. All of this is dangerous.
Fighter pilot business is dangerous and many pilots die. But does that make the aircraft they fly bad? I don't think so. Have some aircraft proved to be more difficult to fly than others? Yes, but usually the Air Force is able to alter their tactics and procedures to mitigate any issues. They train better to avoid dying because the handled the aircraft incorrectly and fly missions in ways that suit their aircraft better.
So are fighters death traps? Not really, unless you don't have enough skill or performance to out fly your adversary. THEN I'd call them death traps.
Well.. An observed 20M rise in sea level back then certainly was NOT because fossil fuels got burned. Which leads to the question, What DID cause it? Which leads us to the question, so how do we know what's happening now? Theories abound, but there is little proof of much of what gets asserted as true in the press. Just tells us we need to keep looking at the issue because we apparently don't fully understand it yet.
That was a long time before the bronze age.. Nobody was burning fossil fuels and dumping CO2 into the air. SO.... How does something like this happen? Can you believe there is some kind of natural process that we don't yet understand going on?
Problem with all of this is that if the process cycles are in the millions of years, it's going to be impossible to really know if your models are accurate because you only have a few thousand years of recorded history to validate your models with. Plus, you don't know if the system has been disturbed by some outside forces, say a meteor strike (think meteor crater) or volcanic eruption.
Interesting evidence guys, please keep looking into this..
Oh don't start with the facts here.... You know how these things get reported by the press. Appeal to the emotion, quote the statistical "it's possible" and go out and find the one or two odd bad outcomes from taking the vaccine and you can get parents around the world to demand that THEIR child not get vaccinated.
I personally know of a young girl who's life was ruined by a bad reaction to a vaccine, but my children where vaccinated anyway. The statistics do NOT lie about this. The medical studies are clear that vaccines are safe and effective or they will NOT be used. Unless they are less risky than the illness they treat, no doctor in his right mind would give them.
Parents.... Do the right thing and do the vaccines recommended by your doctors. Chances are it's going to be better for your child..
Yea, I used to get some serious heat in my old VW Bug that came off the exhaust manifold. You could roast hot dogs with that heater and still be freezing because the door seals let so much cold air in. I had it melt a CD I'd thrown in the back seat once while freezing though Illinois one winter. It was 20 below out and I was freezing, except for the scorch marks on my left ankle and shoe. The poor CD was on the floor right where the hot air came out under the back seat.
Oh the memories of being young and foolish...
Without going too deep into a lesson on thermodynamics, there is not going to be much chance that this works in a modern power station.
Let me put it this way. Current power stations are already engineered to be as efficient as possible. This generally means they are keeping the phase translations of the working liquid using the minimum temperature differentials possible to avoid entropy loss over the ideal Carnot cycle. Any thermally driven power producing device put in series with the heat exchangers is not likely to capture any more power than will be lost by the increased temperature differential required by the device. If this wasn't true, why don't we just attach a boat load of sterling heat engines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine) to do the same thing? Reason: It wreaks the efficiency of the power plant by making the temperature differentials higher.. Chances are this new idea has the same problem.
Now, on your car, or other internal combustion engines, there *might* be some application, but I don't think there will be enough power output to make up for the weight increase. There is a HUGE amount of waste heat from your car engine but the question is how efficiently can we capture that and make useful energy out of it? Answer: Not very... Worth looking at because of the amount of heat being just dumped and the high differential temperatures but not likely to be much gain overall.
I don't think this is an issue. Most batteries are not made of compressible materials or materials that have low boiling points so I seriously doubt that the pressure changes experienced during normal commercial flights are a problem. Now if you have a battery with air pockets or fluids that boil easily, you might have a concern. I don't think any of this is true for LiIon batteries. If there was a concern, I'm sure Boeing was required to demonstrate that their batteries where capable of taking the pressure changes.
Oh I'm not seriously concerned about some kind of issue popping up in the system from time to time. Stuff happens and it's hard to foresee how everything is going to work out over time. Sometimes you just cannot see how things will wear or that the margin for error wasn't quite as good as we thought.
But this airplane has MULTIPLE issues cropping up and we just don't have many flight hours and time in service to justify this many. The evidence is mounting that Boeing may have cut too many corners on this one trying to deliver on a too aggressive schedule at too low of a cost.
http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2013387936_787emergency10.html
Seems that Boeing has a serious problem with recurring issues on the 787 dreamliner. First the three battery fires, now with the rear electronics bay catching fire twice now.
I sure hope the two incidents are NOT related or the FAA is going to have to pull these aircraft out of service again. That would be very bad given we've spent about the same time grounded as actually in service.
Ahhh... Where is the APU in this thing? I'm thinking that they usually are in the tail in large aircraft, but I'm just a software engineer not a pilot or avionics engineer.
APU in tail puts a lot of electrical cables, hot air ducts and fuel lines along side control cables, hydraulic lines and such. APU's provide ground power and air conditioning, compressed air for engine starting along with electrical power. There is a large power distribution infrastructure just under where the fire seems to have caused a problem.
This looks very similar to the avionics bay fire that grounded the test aircraft in Texas. http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2013387936_787emergency10.html
Right... An operative from Airbus commuted arson while is sat on the tarmac?
This plane is having a pretty bumpy start. Years late, an inflight fire during testing, some serious smoking battery issues that got it grounded for months and now this? This does not bode well for Boeing's dream aircraft. The problem here is that unlike most of Boeing's previous aircraft launches, the 787 is having some shockingly serious problems crop up. I think the evidence is mounting that they cut a few to many corners in their bid to cut weight and cost. Hopefully they can pull this together but as the number and seriousness of the issues stack up it starts looking less and less likely.
Seems the dream is turning into a nightmare.... A really hot and smokey nightmare. If the flying public looses confidence in the aircraft or it gets grounded again for months, this is going to be really bad for the company.
You will not be able to do this in a communications limited environment. What you describe requires high bandwidth and fairly low latency communications paths in both directions. These paths will need to make at least one RF hop (ground to aircraft) so they are subject to disruption by the bad guys. The more aircraft you have in an area, the more bandwidth and RF links you will need. The more bandwidth you need, the easier it is to disrupt your communications.
So, unless you know the bad guys can't disrupt your RF links AND you can operate enough of these aircraft in the desired area without having them interfere with each other your expensive unmanned aircraft are unable to perform the mission.
Jamming equipment is easily obtained and cheap. It is not that technically challenging to improvise really effective jamming capacity from common consumer electronic devices and it's not much harder to design and build systems that could at least degrade most communications in small areas. Jamming capacity is well within the means of most states (and a lot of stateless groups) we may be in conflict with.
We still need manned machines. Manned systems are capable, even in communications denied environments where UAV's cannot effectively operate. Should we be investing in UAV's? Sure, but we should be investing in manned systems right along side them.
If you can pre-plan everything, a drone works great in a communications denied environment, usually. If you want or need to have human interaction with a drone to adjust the plan for changing conditions then you have a problem in a communications denied environment. If your drone uses GPS for navigation even, you have a SERIOUS problem if your enemy has fairly low tech equipment that can jam or spoof GPS.
Denying (jamming) communications or GPS is not technically difficult. It may be a bit beyond the enemy in the currently active conflicts, but it's a fool who doesn't look at the geopolitical situation and see that it is well within the capabilities of 95% of the rest of the world. Even North Korea could disable communications and prevent communications with drones in their airspace and they are pretty much third world.
So do we just start buying unnamed aircraft and expect that they can take care of things for us? I think that idea is stupid. We had better keep a man in the machine for at least some of what we buy.
I'm going to have to disagree with you because there simply are things that a manned aircraft can do that simply cannot be done by a remotely piloted one.
Sure, you can tell something to go fly over there and blow up that spot or even program it to go find a specific target you can define well enough that a computer can find the desired target. Cruse missiles are GREAT stand off weapons and we've been doing this kind of thing for years, albeit in a pretty expensive way. We've vastly improved on such weapons since the V2 of WW2.
But, you are going to need a man in the loop when attacking multiple kinds of targets or targets that move. An example would be close air support of ground troops. There is no way you are going to be as effective flying CAS missions when the pilot is multiple satellite hops delayed or be able to properly plan an ingress route, weapon release point, target location and egress route, upload it as quickly as a pilot in the aircraft can.
But, I think the issue really is communications. If your planning to do more than launch a cruse missile and forget it, you are going to need to communicate with your fleet of drones so you can at least task them. If you want to get video or stills from the drones so you can actually take a look at what you are shooting at, that takes lots of bandwidth. All this has latency requirements too. The more you have the man in the loop, the more bandwidth, lower bit error rates and lower latency your communications have to be. However, communications links are both hard to establish and even harder to maintain, especially if your adversaries are even slightly technologically capable. Jamming data links is not that hard.
If you communicate with the drone (and a lot of useful missions require bi-directional communications) then stealth is out the window. Why bother with stealth aircraft if you put a RF transmitter on board? It's like trying to hide a lighthouse at night..
Manned aircraft don't suffer from the communications issue. You can explain to a pilot what you want him to do, send him up in an armed aircraft and wait for him to come back. He can manage the task if the target moves or shows up in the wrong place. He can react to unforeseen circumstances and modify how he executes his task and still achieve the goals. You don't have to watch what he's doing to make sure the mission continues and you don't have to talk to him along the way. You can send him in a stealth aircraft and not need to put a RF source on it too.
Manned aircraft, fighters, bombers and the rest are going to be around a long time yet. Just like autopilots haven't done away with pilots, drones will not do away with them either. Sure, there are special cases where drones are good solutions, but manned aircraft are here to stay.
Watersides are just slippery slopes.... Which is a logical argument...
It just doesn't stop them from parting out the thing. Removing the SSD, memory and such is a quickly done. Common laptop repair parts, (screens, keyboards, batteries, chargers and even processors) are usually not that hard to remove. Remember, the thief just wants a quick buck,. It doesn't matter to them what the thing retails for, they will just sell what they can and trash the rest.