What needs to happen with this whole business is that the law needs to recognize that, based on factual observation, there is no distinct boundary between alive and not alive. Instead there is a gradual development of attributes that make destruction increasingly undesirable.
Actually, the Roe vs. Wade surpreme court decision has this effect. The regulatory authority of the government changes based on the trimester.
What about the guy in 101 Dalmations? He's smoking his pipe in almost every scene. I don't really pay much attention to Disney cartoons, maybe they have released a "special edition" that removes the pipe?
More and more industrial motors are being controlled by variable-frequency drives, which must internally convert incoming AC power to DC and then back to AC.
While there is no reason to replace a three phase AC motor with a DC motor, You might start powering variable-frequency drives directly from a DC distribution system.
For a given wire DC will have losses than AC. The problem has been converting between high and low voltages. Transformers are highly efficient (>80%), but only work with AC. Power electronics work with DC, but are less efficient than transformers.
DC becomes more practical than AC when your transmission line is long enough that the greater transmission efficiency exceeds the lesser efficiency of the power electronics.
As power electronics improve, this distance shortens.
No, they can't. Somewhere on that ship there must be pumps running, fans circulating air, people moving around. All of those things can cause noise. Crew generated noises are by far the easiest way to detect a submarine.
All nuclear powered submarines have turbines (for now), but how much noise gets emitted into the water if that turbine has no physical connection to the hull?
Every single Seawolf and Virginia class submarine has a permanently installed noise augmenter to make them louder.
No one outside a very small group of people knows how quiet they really are, because those noise augmenters don't get turned off when they are underway.
Even with the augmentation, they are still orders of magnitude quieter than previous generations.
Even the 688 class submarines have unknown capabilities when it comes to stealth. Just because you can hear something underwater doesn't automatically mean you can track it.
USS Hartford grounding (I was onboard for that one)
It's hard to describe, but the attitudes changed as the old-timers who were on the ship when I was the new guy left. People lost pride in their jobs. Basic DC (damage control) skills evaporated. For all those reading this where were/are on a submarine: can you find all the EAB manifolds between shaft alley and the watertight door blindfolded? Did you every try?
It is a requirement that a submariner earn his warfare pin within one year. If he couldn't do it, then he was sent to the surface fleet. Now people routinely go past the 1 year mark and it is almost unheard of for a person to not qualify, no matter now little they know. If another major submarine fire happens underway, I really expect the ship to be lost because no one took that training seriously.
The worst part is that for all the bad things that happened on our ship, many of the other ships were even worse.
Is this beause there are better options for potential recruits in the civilian world and the Navy is forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel to meet the recruiting requirements? Are you losing the mid-level NCO's and junior officers because of shitty service conditions?
Yes and yes.
Supply and demand is working against the submarine community (same in most of the military). As the recruiting pool shrinks people who would never have made it before must be retained. As the quality of new sailors showing up on the boat decreases this causes increased frustration for the more experienced sailors. Less of these people stay in, and the people who remain tend to be unemployable in the civilian world.
The ability of a submarine to remain undetected and at the same time to detect enemy submarines is as fundamental to the concept of a submarine as the ability to fly is to an airplane.
Part of the problem is something very simple (in a Freakonomics sort of way):
Laser eye surgery is destroying the Navy
Every single officer* who joins the Navy wants to be a pilot. In the past, many smart people with less-than-perfect vision joined the Navy and many were sent to submarines. Now, all the smart ones get surgery and become pilots. It almost makes me cry to remember the type of people who now make "nuclear officers".
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Actually, the Roe vs. Wade surpreme court decision has this effect. The regulatory authority of the government changes based on the trimester.
What will really throw a wrench into the anti stem-cell argument is when an adult skin cell has a non-zero probability of becoming a zygote.
We certainly can't do it now, but is there any real doubt that this will be a possibility in the future?
Of course, we still need to answer some questions: what are rights? who(what?) gets them, and why?
Once we really have the answers to those questions, all this controversy will sort itself out.
Fascism is the opposite of liberty, not democracy.
Liberty and democracy are not the same thing. One is far more valuable than the other.
From the we-must-censor-the-past department...
What about the guy in 101 Dalmations? He's smoking his pipe in almost every scene. I don't really pay much attention to Disney cartoons, maybe they have released a "special edition" that removes the pipe?
I am convinced that this is the best xkcd ever.
Apparently at that point in history a superior immune system was more of an evolutionary advantage than a superior intelligence.
The only way you are going to convert one DC voltage to a higher DC voltage is:
More and more industrial motors are being controlled by variable-frequency drives, which must internally convert incoming AC power to DC and then back to AC.
While there is no reason to replace a three phase AC motor with a DC motor, You might start powering variable-frequency drives directly from a DC distribution system.
For a given wire DC will have losses than AC. The problem has been converting between high and low voltages. Transformers are highly efficient (>80%), but only work with AC. Power electronics work with DC, but are less efficient than transformers.
DC becomes more practical than AC when your transmission line is long enough that the greater transmission efficiency exceeds the lesser efficiency of the power electronics.
As power electronics improve, this distance shortens.
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Oct 5 20:32
You will be assimilated
All nuclear powered submarines have turbines (for now), but how much noise gets emitted into the water if that turbine has no physical connection to the hull?
Every single Seawolf and Virginia class submarine has a permanently installed noise augmenter to make them louder.
No one outside a very small group of people knows how quiet they really are, because those noise augmenters don't get turned off when they are underway.
Even with the augmentation, they are still orders of magnitude quieter than previous generations.
Even the 688 class submarines have unknown capabilities when it comes to stealth. Just because you can hear something underwater doesn't automatically mean you can track it.
For one thing, it is illegal for me to say a lot of things.
Here's a hint: How much of the world's population lives withing 20 miles of a coast? How many of those people use cell phones?
Many orders of magnitude less power.
Of course the new XXXXXXXXX technology will be just as quiet...
Do you know what is inside a Virginia class submarine? There is a lot more to making a submarine quiet than you are aware of.
USS Hartford grounding (I was onboard for that one)
It's hard to describe, but the attitudes changed as the old-timers who were on the ship when I was the new guy left. People lost pride in their jobs. Basic DC (damage control) skills evaporated. For all those reading this where were/are on a submarine: can you find all the EAB manifolds between shaft alley and the watertight door blindfolded? Did you every try?
It is a requirement that a submariner earn his warfare pin within one year. If he couldn't do it, then he was sent to the surface fleet. Now people routinely go past the 1 year mark and it is almost unheard of for a person to not qualify, no matter now little they know. If another major submarine fire happens underway, I really expect the ship to be lost because no one took that training seriously.
The worst part is that for all the bad things that happened on our ship, many of the other ships were even worse.
Not a Virginia class...
Supply and demand is working against the submarine community (same in most of the military). As the recruiting pool shrinks people who would never have made it before must be retained. As the quality of new sailors showing up on the boat decreases this causes increased frustration for the more experienced sailors. Less of these people stay in, and the people who remain tend to be unemployable in the civilian world.
Can you say positive feedback?
Part of the problem is something very simple (in a Freakonomics sort of way):
Laser eye surgery is destroying the Navy
Every single officer* who joins the Navy wants to be a pilot. In the past, many smart people with less-than-perfect vision joined the Navy and many were sent to submarines. Now, all the smart ones get surgery and become pilots. It almost makes me cry to remember the type of people who now make "nuclear officers".
* (not much of an exaggeration)
Because those active sonars kill the whales.
Not really. Our submarines are far superior to the Chinese even now, but the problem is the crews.
One of the reasons I got out of the submarine business is how far the standards have fallen even in the 6 short years I was on a submarine.
Modern submariners are a joke compared to their cold war predecessors.