You mean apart from directly disobeying orders by going right up to the chinese border, which led to prolonging the conflict and forcing the chinese into helping the North?
He should have been courtmartialled and discharged for that, if not what he pulled in England.
"Instead of dropping the bomb they could have demonstrated the bomb"
After the Tokyo firestorms didn't induce surrender, it was pretty clear that the military leaderrs were hellbent on "defending to the last living soul"
Even after Hiroshima, most wanted to continue. Hiroshima forced the Emperor to intervene, which wouldn't have happened under normal warfare for quite some time.
"For those that think they could have gotten by with regular bombing I'd remind them that generals tried to stop the surrender broadcast even AFTER the bombs and even broadcast a speech saying that the Japanese should fight to the very last person."
This. They only surrendered because the Emperor intervened and told them to - and even then there were elements trying to unseat the emperor to continue fighting.
Many more people died in the Tokyo firestorms from conventional raids than from the 2 nukes combined, but the military leaders were determined to keep fighting in the face of increasing internal demands to surrender.
"the incoming flight lands on top of the crashed light plane"
Final responsibility for aircraft safety lies with the pilot. If the controllers clear you to land and there's an obstruction on the runway, you _WILL_ say so and go around.
I know, because it's happened to me. The tower controller was extremely apologetic afterwards.
Tower ATCs only handle aircraft in the immediate vicinity of the airport and ground traffic. At larger airports (all the london ones mentioned) there is a separate ground traffic controller.
Everything else is handled by regional ATC
Enhanced optics in a tower is a good thing and I doubt any tower operator will be deskilled as in the larger sites it will be an adjunct to them, not "instead of" - the main use for this kind of thing is allowing ATC operations at currently-uncontrolled sites or sites where it's economically marginal to keep ATCs employed.
The ACC and other bits you have on your truck are designed with stringent operational limitations to reduce liability issues.
The field of vision they have is nothing like what an automated vehicle has.
My decade-old car has ACC and what spooks it is quite predictable - just like a blinkered horse - which is what you'd expect from a very simple system with only one POV of the road ahead - unlike the 360 degree multispectral vision that autonomous cars have.
Autonomous vehicles are nothing like these simplistic creations and they're being prepped to work in all weather conditions.
If you get the chance to try out Mercedes new trucks (freightliners in the USA) then do so, especially their technology demonstrators. Large vehicles are where automation will pay dividends first and fastest, freeing the driver to get on with paperwork, etc.
"The best hope, to my mind, is to try and reduce the disadvantages with which so many in the world find themselves encumbered"
Wars tend to be fought over potable water and access to energy (food is secondary, with energy and water you can grow food), with poverty and egos the prime driving factors (egos of the leaders and poverty meaning that the followers don't have much to lose). Poverty is also the driving factor of most religions, which is one of the reasons why the USA's most religious areas are also the ones with poor economic performance.
Widespread distribution of LFTRs would go a _long_ way to equalising that out - you can purify water with them as well as cheaply supply the energy needs of a community and they're relatively safe (safer than BWR and much safer than coal). Any attempt to fiddle with the LFTR cycle to pull out materials for nefarious purposes is detectable as reductions in output and once running most of the stuff is so fiercely radioactive you'd have to be well-equipped to do so anyway.
Wind/Solar/Tide power are all unreliable, not-dense enough(*) and in the case of solar, fiercely polluting for solar PV systems. At some point China's going to shut down those plants on environmental grounds.
It wouldn't surprise me if China has cheap reactor-based energy export as a long-term objective for their thorium research in addition to supplying their own needs. Doing so would open the way up for them to have a lot of very happy consumers to buy manufactured goods. War may sell in the short term, but peace builds markets in the long one and paradoxically those happy consumers would also help reduce the long-term human population, as is being seen across the "developed" world - richer people choose to have fewer children, which is a positive feedback loop.
(*) You could carpet the UK in windmills and only replace 10% of current electrical needs at best. Moving off gas heating and to more-electric vehicles will increase electricity demands by a factor of at least 5 over current levels.
Putting windmills/solar in the Sahara is a non-starter for both logistical reasons (the interconnectors would be mindbogglingly expensive, far more so than simply building nukes where needed and that's apart from the issue of "sand") and political ones (the countries whose terroritory encompasses the Sahara would demand first access to the energy and as soon as saharan/sub-saharan africa gets access to cheap energy, demand will exceed supply within a few years.)
It's better to concentrate on technology we know will work safely and make it as safe as possible and as widely available as possible - this would go a long way towards solving "migration" crises as there would be a reduction in both wars and better living standards would drastically reduce the numbers of people desperate enough to consider risking their lives to go to someplace "better than here"
"So, you can't build more than X houses along the beach."
But you _can_ go to another beach.
The population density on most planets in the ST universe is extremely low, meaming that if you don't want to encounter other people (humans, reptiliians or small furry purple beings from tau ceti alpha), then you don't have to.
The problem is that the government dictates commercial activities. You're not going to put anything in spaaaaace without a government permit - even if you launch it from outside the USA - unless it's 100% designed, built and integrated outside of the reach of UncleSam (even then, you may find it difficult if you have commercial activities within the USA.)
Congressional pork is a given. The USA is openly corrupt in many areas. The best thing the commercial companies can do for their own long-term survival is learn who to hand the brown envelopes to.
The cometary surface was at least 10 times harder than expected.
If you want a harpoon to work you'll probably need an explosive tip and umbrella barbs to hook your white whale^W^Wcomet and I suspect that you're going to need unfeasibly long line with amazingly high breaking strain simply to handle the delta-V
It's a nice idea but we probably don't (yet) have the technology to pull it off - and when we do, the space elevator problem will be solved, which makes launch masses far less of an issue.
"Fossil fuel use simply won't go away, at least for industrial needs, until we have small-industrial-scale nuclear plants of one kind or another, and fission doesn't seem promising for that. "
Water-based nukes aren't hot enough for the most part, however there are proposals for Thorium MSR systems which are small enough to fit in a 40 foot shipping container and put out 8-20MW of heat at 800-1200C.
If you need a source of concentrated heat and carbon gets too expensive then other heat sources will be put into action.
1: The sahara desert is a complex ecosystem. Panels will damage it.
2: large parts are warzones.
3: It has mountains and other geography which get in the way.
4: There's this pesky stuff called "sand" which keeps moving around and burying anything that isn't mobile or wet.
5: "Generate power for the entire planet" is a major exaggeration. The Californian solar-thermal plant can't even generate enough power to feed more than 10% of houses _IN ITS AREA_. If African society increases its energy consumption to "western levels" it will account for every Joule generated and then some.
6: Exporting what it does generate will make Africa collectively even more pissed off about colonial expliotation than they already are
7: Even if that was to happen, you're talking about an infrastructure project a dozen times larger than anything ever built in the past, simply for electricity transmission, let along the panels - and losses over long-distance lines are substantial even with HVDC
8: If "we" are to reduce carbon emissions then that means not only converting existing carbon-fired systems to non-carbon sources, but also:
i: doubling it (at least) to take over from carbon-driven heating systems in cold climates (ground heat pumps and suchlike can only do so much) - heating accounts for as much carbon emission as electricity production and people won't stand for conventional nuke plants nearby so they can act as district heating.cooling systems too.
ii: doubling that result and then some, to account for transportation going more-electric (75% of carbon emissions are in transport)
Solar PV and wind simply don't have the energy density needed.
"The reporters found that the company was dumping silicon tetrachloride waste on neighboring fields instead of investing in equipment that could reprocess it, rendering those fields useless for growing crops and inflaming the eyes and throats of nearby residents. And the article suggested that the company was not alone in this practice."
" In August 2011, a factory in China’s Zhejiang province owned by Jinko Solar Holding Co., one of the largest photovoltaic companies in the world, spilled hydrofluoric acid into the nearby Mujiaqiao River, killing hundreds of fish. And farmers working adjacent lands, who used the contaminated water to clean their animals, accidently killed dozens of pigs."
[ you really don't want to go anywhere near hydrofluric acid. One drop on your hand can easily result in the entire arm being amputated.]
etc etc
Seriously: the energy cost of making solar panels is only at or just past breakeven over the life of the panels. Windfarms are in a similar situation, because the big turbines have a nasty habit of eating gearboxes (they're only profitable when stopped, but collecting subsidies)
Fusion would be nice, but I doubt we'll see it in my grandchildrens' lifespans.
In the meantime we need fission _now_ (PWR/BWR systems for the moment and LFTR-style system as soon as they're mature enough to be rolled out as civil systems). Continuing to dump carbon into the atmosphere at uncontrolled rates is likely to kill us far faster than any global warming scaremonger might realise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"A good few of those more recent 747 sales were the -8 Freighter. These are very popular with cargo lines."
There's good reason for this. The Big Twins are efficient at hauling Pax but that comes at cost of payload mass.
People will point out that a 777 has a lot more cubic feet of cargo capacity available than a fully-laden-with-pax A380 (or 747), but they neglect to mention that the A380 or 747 can actually haul more cargo mass in the same situation on long-haul flights (ie: the 777 is great if you're freighting fluffy pillows transoceanic)
4 engine aircraft simply have greater lifting muscle. That's not necessary on a long-thin passenger route but it's important if you're DHL and friends.
"Making fraud hard at the exclusion of 0.001% of the population is better than making voting fraud easy."
The incidence of voting fraud in the USA _before_ photo ID requirements went into place was vanishingly low (single/double digits in each state) and unless it's organised (therefore detectable), it makes no statistical difference to the outcome.
The real way to throw elections is systematic disenfranchisment, which is a policy the USA has been pursuing for decades.
F22 and F35 stealth is _only_ valid nose-on and up to 30 degrees off that axis.
At any other angle (including over-the-horizon radar) it's useless. As soon as you have networked radar stations the game is over.
The original combat design was for the (expensive) F22 to establish air superiority and take out radar stations, leaving the (cheap) F35 to fly unopposed in a primarily ground-attack role or long-distance stand-off missile launch.
Because the F22 got too expensive, everything got concentrated on the F35 - which is now more expensive than the F22.
It's a tubby thing with stubby wings. It wasn't designed for dogfighting, nor was it designed to avoid SAMs. In either situation it will lose. It should be designated the A35, but that wouldn't be acceptable to many.
Last time around this multirole stuff was tried, it got dropped (F-111 family) and replaced with F14/15/16 - this time it's too deeply entrenched in pork. This could be the weapon that sank the US military.
"Service members actually get a huge pay raise when they get married."
And yet, the largest single group of food stamp recipients in the USA happens to be serving military personnell who are married.
Whilst the overall USA military budget is stupidly large (larger than the next 10 countries combined), the amount it pays its staff is pititful - and the way it treats its veterans is beneath contempt.
If you're going to put people through a meat grinder the very least you can do is pay for their upkeep when they come back broken.
Slashdot Mirror
Bunyips and dropbears spring to mind as potential dangers too.
"How come noone seems to address the issue of the very high cosmic radiation exposure at such a high flight alitude?"
1: It isn't high enough to be of any concern for the flight durations in question
2: Space suits have no cosmic ray protection in them.
"And look what MacArthur did in Korea an Inchon."
You mean apart from directly disobeying orders by going right up to the chinese border, which led to prolonging the conflict and forcing the chinese into helping the North?
He should have been courtmartialled and discharged for that, if not what he pulled in England.
"Instead of dropping the bomb they could have demonstrated the bomb"
After the Tokyo firestorms didn't induce surrender, it was pretty clear that the military leaderrs were hellbent on "defending to the last living soul"
Even after Hiroshima, most wanted to continue. Hiroshima forced the Emperor to intervene, which wouldn't have happened under normal warfare for quite some time.
"For those that think they could have gotten by with regular bombing I'd remind them that generals tried to stop the surrender broadcast even AFTER the bombs and even broadcast a speech saying that the Japanese should fight to the very last person."
This. They only surrendered because the Emperor intervened and told them to - and even then there were elements trying to unseat the emperor to continue fighting.
Many more people died in the Tokyo firestorms from conventional raids than from the 2 nukes combined, but the military leaders were determined to keep fighting in the face of increasing internal demands to surrender.
"the incoming flight lands on top of the crashed light plane"
Final responsibility for aircraft safety lies with the pilot. If the controllers clear you to land and there's an obstruction on the runway, you _WILL_ say so and go around.
I know, because it's happened to me. The tower controller was extremely apologetic afterwards.
Some clarification on this:
Tower ATCs only handle aircraft in the immediate vicinity of the airport and ground traffic. At larger airports (all the london ones mentioned) there is a separate ground traffic controller.
Everything else is handled by regional ATC
Enhanced optics in a tower is a good thing and I doubt any tower operator will be deskilled as in the larger sites it will be an adjunct to them, not "instead of" - the main use for this kind of thing is allowing ATC operations at currently-uncontrolled sites or sites where it's economically marginal to keep ATCs employed.
"I find that blocked heads are perpetually a problem"
You're not using it enough.
Seriously.
Inkjets which clog are inkjets which aren't being used every day.
In a car that has a lot to do with the fuel also being the coolant for the in-tank fuel pump.
Prolonged driving around on E can be bad for your maintenance bill.
The ACC and other bits you have on your truck are designed with stringent operational limitations to reduce liability issues.
The field of vision they have is nothing like what an automated vehicle has.
My decade-old car has ACC and what spooks it is quite predictable - just like a blinkered horse - which is what you'd expect from a very simple system with only one POV of the road ahead - unlike the 360 degree multispectral vision that autonomous cars have.
Autonomous vehicles are nothing like these simplistic creations and they're being prepped to work in all weather conditions.
If you get the chance to try out Mercedes new trucks (freightliners in the USA) then do so, especially their technology demonstrators. Large vehicles are where automation will pay dividends first and fastest, freeing the driver to get on with paperwork, etc.
Once cars are "autos", you won't need to own one. Humans Need Not Apply as drivers anymore too.
"The best hope, to my mind, is to try and reduce the disadvantages with which so many in the world find themselves encumbered"
Wars tend to be fought over potable water and access to energy (food is secondary, with energy and water you can grow food), with poverty and egos the prime driving factors (egos of the leaders and poverty meaning that the followers don't have much to lose). Poverty is also the driving factor of most religions, which is one of the reasons why the USA's most religious areas are also the ones with poor economic performance.
Widespread distribution of LFTRs would go a _long_ way to equalising that out - you can purify water with them as well as cheaply supply the energy needs of a community and they're relatively safe (safer than BWR and much safer than coal). Any attempt to fiddle with the LFTR cycle to pull out materials for nefarious purposes is detectable as reductions in output and once running most of the stuff is so fiercely radioactive you'd have to be well-equipped to do so anyway.
Wind/Solar/Tide power are all unreliable, not-dense enough(*) and in the case of solar, fiercely polluting for solar PV systems. At some point China's going to shut down those plants on environmental grounds.
It wouldn't surprise me if China has cheap reactor-based energy export as a long-term objective for their thorium research in addition to supplying their own needs. Doing so would open the way up for them to have a lot of very happy consumers to buy manufactured goods. War may sell in the short term, but peace builds markets in the long one and paradoxically those happy consumers would also help reduce the long-term human population, as is being seen across the "developed" world - richer people choose to have fewer children, which is a positive feedback loop.
(*) You could carpet the UK in windmills and only replace 10% of current electrical needs at best. Moving off gas heating and to more-electric vehicles will increase electricity demands by a factor of at least 5 over current levels.
Putting windmills/solar in the Sahara is a non-starter for both logistical reasons (the interconnectors would be mindbogglingly expensive, far more so than simply building nukes where needed and that's apart from the issue of "sand") and political ones (the countries whose terroritory encompasses the Sahara would demand first access to the energy and as soon as saharan/sub-saharan africa gets access to cheap energy, demand will exceed supply within a few years.)
It's better to concentrate on technology we know will work safely and make it as safe as possible and as widely available as possible - this would go a long way towards solving "migration" crises as there would be a reduction in both wars and better living standards would drastically reduce the numbers of people desperate enough to consider risking their lives to go to someplace "better than here"
"So, you can't build more than X houses along the beach."
But you _can_ go to another beach.
The population density on most planets in the ST universe is extremely low, meaming that if you don't want to encounter other people (humans, reptiliians or small furry purple beings from tau ceti alpha), then you don't have to.
The problem is that the government dictates commercial activities. You're not going to put anything in spaaaaace without a government permit - even if you launch it from outside the USA - unless it's 100% designed, built and integrated outside of the reach of UncleSam (even then, you may find it difficult if you have commercial activities within the USA.)
Congressional pork is a given. The USA is openly corrupt in many areas. The best thing the commercial companies can do for their own long-term survival is learn who to hand the brown envelopes to.
The cometary surface was at least 10 times harder than expected.
If you want a harpoon to work you'll probably need an explosive tip and umbrella barbs to hook your white whale^W^Wcomet and I suspect that you're going to need unfeasibly long line with amazingly high breaking strain simply to handle the delta-V
It's a nice idea but we probably don't (yet) have the technology to pull it off - and when we do, the space elevator problem will be solved, which makes launch masses far less of an issue.
There's an argument that thinfilm window coatings tuned for Infrared and Ultraviolet might be useful.
The counterargument is a straight economic analysis of whether the cost of installation will be outweighed by the energy savings/generation.
My money is that the numbers say "don't bother"
It's far more efficient at killing bats.
"Fossil fuel use simply won't go away, at least for industrial needs, until we have small-industrial-scale nuclear plants of one kind or another, and fission doesn't seem promising for that. "
Water-based nukes aren't hot enough for the most part, however there are proposals for Thorium MSR systems which are small enough to fit in a 40 foot shipping container and put out 8-20MW of heat at 800-1200C.
If you need a source of concentrated heat and carbon gets too expensive then other heat sources will be put into action.
1: The sahara desert is a complex ecosystem. Panels will damage it.
2: large parts are warzones.
3: It has mountains and other geography which get in the way.
4: There's this pesky stuff called "sand" which keeps moving around and burying anything that isn't mobile or wet.
5: "Generate power for the entire planet" is a major exaggeration. The Californian solar-thermal plant can't even generate enough power to feed more than 10% of houses _IN ITS AREA_. If African society increases its energy consumption to "western levels" it will account for every Joule generated and then some.
6: Exporting what it does generate will make Africa collectively even more pissed off about colonial expliotation than they already are
7: Even if that was to happen, you're talking about an infrastructure project a dozen times larger than anything ever built in the past, simply for electricity transmission, let along the panels - and losses over long-distance lines are substantial even with HVDC
8: If "we" are to reduce carbon emissions then that means not only converting existing carbon-fired systems to non-carbon sources, but also:
i: doubling it (at least) to take over from carbon-driven heating systems in cold climates (ground heat pumps and suchlike can only do so much) - heating accounts for as much carbon emission as electricity production and people won't stand for conventional nuke plants nearby so they can act as district heating.cooling systems too.
ii: doubling that result and then some, to account for transportation going more-electric (75% of carbon emissions are in transport)
Solar PV and wind simply don't have the energy density needed.
You missed "except when you have to put up with the chmical wastes from solar PV production."
http://news.nationalgeographic...
http://www.science20.com/scien...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/green...
"The reporters found that the company was dumping silicon tetrachloride waste on neighboring fields instead of investing in equipment that could reprocess it, rendering those fields useless for growing crops and inflaming the eyes and throats of nearby residents. And the article suggested that the company was not alone in this practice."
" In August 2011, a factory in China’s Zhejiang province owned by Jinko Solar Holding Co., one of the largest photovoltaic companies in the world, spilled hydrofluoric acid into the nearby Mujiaqiao River, killing hundreds of fish. And farmers working adjacent lands, who used the contaminated water to clean their animals, accidently killed dozens of pigs."
[ you really don't want to go anywhere near hydrofluric acid. One drop on your hand can easily result in the entire arm being amputated.]
etc etc
Seriously: the energy cost of making solar panels is only at or just past breakeven over the life of the panels. Windfarms are in a similar situation, because the big turbines have a nasty habit of eating gearboxes (they're only profitable when stopped, but collecting subsidies)
Fusion would be nice, but I doubt we'll see it in my grandchildrens' lifespans.
In the meantime we need fission _now_ (PWR/BWR systems for the moment and LFTR-style system as soon as they're mature enough to be rolled out as civil systems). Continuing to dump carbon into the atmosphere at uncontrolled rates is likely to kill us far faster than any global warming scaremonger might realise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"A good few of those more recent 747 sales were the -8 Freighter. These are very popular with cargo lines."
There's good reason for this. The Big Twins are efficient at hauling Pax but that comes at cost of payload mass.
People will point out that a 777 has a lot more cubic feet of cargo capacity available than a fully-laden-with-pax A380 (or 747), but they neglect to mention that the A380 or 747 can actually haul more cargo mass in the same situation on long-haul flights (ie: the 777 is great if you're freighting fluffy pillows transoceanic)
4 engine aircraft simply have greater lifting muscle. That's not necessary on a long-thin passenger route but it's important if you're DHL and friends.
"Making fraud hard at the exclusion of 0.001% of the population is better than making voting fraud easy."
The incidence of voting fraud in the USA _before_ photo ID requirements went into place was vanishingly low (single/double digits in each state) and unless it's organised (therefore detectable), it makes no statistical difference to the outcome.
The real way to throw elections is systematic disenfranchisment, which is a policy the USA has been pursuing for decades.
It gets far worse than that. The F16 was intentionally crippled (fuel tanks, etc all bolted on) to bring it to as large a disadvantage as possible.
It still ate the F35's dogfood.
"It gets worse for stealth though"
F22 and F35 stealth is _only_ valid nose-on and up to 30 degrees off that axis.
At any other angle (including over-the-horizon radar) it's useless. As soon as you have networked radar stations the game is over.
The original combat design was for the (expensive) F22 to establish air superiority and take out radar stations, leaving the (cheap) F35 to fly unopposed in a primarily ground-attack role or long-distance stand-off missile launch.
Because the F22 got too expensive, everything got concentrated on the F35 - which is now more expensive than the F22.
It's a tubby thing with stubby wings. It wasn't designed for dogfighting, nor was it designed to avoid SAMs. In either situation it will lose. It should be designated the A35, but that wouldn't be acceptable to many.
Last time around this multirole stuff was tried, it got dropped (F-111 family) and replaced with F14/15/16 - this time it's too deeply entrenched in pork. This could be the weapon that sank the US military.
"Service members actually get a huge pay raise when they get married."
And yet, the largest single group of food stamp recipients in the USA happens to be serving military personnell who are married.
Whilst the overall USA military budget is stupidly large (larger than the next 10 countries combined), the amount it pays its staff is pititful - and the way it treats its veterans is beneath contempt.
If you're going to put people through a meat grinder the very least you can do is pay for their upkeep when they come back broken.