There must be some reason why the South of Japan is not one mass of Kudzu and cogongrass.
There is - the South of Japan is (relatively) cool and very mountainous. It's harder for plant to get a toehold and harder for them to spread widely. Meanwhile, the American South is warm and relatively flat - a virtual microwave oven for plant growth.
Let me give you an example; between 1998 and 2004 about 4 million were killed in the second congo war; and that was a fairly localised conflict. Add that to the casualties form the other wars in that period and you like get a figure not far off a world war.
I got news for you...while I will not go into any more detail than this, while I was in the Air Force I worked on a system for three years for the Strategic Air Command that would automatically launch all of our ICBMs if the chain of command was ever knocked out.
Of course you won't go into details - because the system you described never existed. It sounds more like you're confused (very confused) about how ABNCP/TACAMO or the ERCS worked.
In fact, US policy was to keep man-in-the-loop to the lowest operational levels possible in order to prevent a 'Dead Hand' scenario. Strategic policy (implicit from the 60's and explicit from the 80's) was to prepare for nuclear war fighting, not 'wargasm'. Furthermore, it was US policy was to publicize such things - because (as TFA correctly points out) deterrence doesn't work if the other side doesn't know its supposed to be deterred.
I am always amazed that the world has managed to avoid a nuclear war.
Many people not familiar with either the psychology of deterrence or with how the systems worked are so amazed.
The reason nobody talks about Perimeter is that it is largely the creation of Yarynich and Blair... A neat piece of semi fiction largely believable in the era immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, but increasingly irrelevant ever since. The rest of the world has moved on, but like the one trick ponies they are Yarynich and Blair keep flogging the same dead horse. (Well, most of the rest of the world has moved on - there's still a thriving industry in creative semi fiction about the Cold War.)
So maybe it would be more environmentally sound to run a closed loop out to the current to cool the water and bring it back?
Not really, because then you need some nasty chemicals painted onto your heat exchanger to keep sea weed and barnacles from growing on it.
Paint the heat exchanger with poison, poison the water coming into the heat exchanger, it's the same either way - because if you don't, and it's in contact with seawater, something is going to try to attach itself to it and grow.
Not to mention pumping low pressure water down into the ocean depths is going to require considerable wall thickness to prevent the pipe from being crushed. Or you can use a high pressure system, with fairly thick walls to prevent the shallow and above the water portions from exploding.
Marvel needs to get back to it's roots selling comics that everyone wants to read, not just 30 something fanboys who obsess over whether or not Kevin Smith did justice to the Green Arrow.
'Get back to their roots'? Are you kidding? The only thing that's changed is the age of the fanboy Marvel is marketing to.
I agree the useful life time of some tools are cut short by technology and progress. My point is that when it comes to programming languages, their useful life often seems determined not by technology and progress, but by 'technology' and 'progress'. By marketing speak, popularity, and fads.
How many times a day do people use applications that rely other languages that predate the moon landing?
It would be interesting to see a graph of the ages of the languages people use/encounter (even, as with COBOL, unwittingly). I expect it would be an inverse bell curve, perhaps even a bathtub curve with steep walls at each end...
It would serve as a powerful lesson for language developers and programmers to quit mucking around with the latest 'paradigms' and programming fads and to concentrate on systems that Simply Just Work.
Of over 100 missions 2 disasters isn't too bad, it much better than Apollo and no-one brings up the failures of Apollo whenever it's mentioned like they do with the Shuttle.
For that matter, other than the Apollo 1 fire and the Apollo 13 fire/explosion (and maybe the computer faults on 11) - most people aren't even aware of the multitude and magnitude of the failures experienced during Apollo.
For example:
Apollo 13 - severe POGO vibration came within seconds of reaching a magnitude sufficient to destroy the launch vehicle, averted only because the vibration caused the center J2 engine on the S-II stage to fail and shutdown.
Severe vibration were also encountered on 11 and 12 but never reached dangerous levels. A fix was available in time for 13's flight, but management elected not to delay the flight to retrofit the fix into the booster.
Apollo 14
Docking mechanism failure after Trans Lunar Injection. Contrary to mission rules, the flight controllers directed the crew to 'brute force' the docking risking severe damage to the CM and LM.
Loss of Landing Radar. In violation of mission rules, crew continued with landing.
Apollo 15 - During landing, one parachute failed to deploy.
Apollo 16 - While in lunar orbit, it was discovered that the primary wiring harness for the SM's main propulsion system was damaged and inoperable. Despite a mission rule requiring an immediate mission abort and return to Earth, management and controllers elected to continue with the mission.
Skylab IV (Carr, Pogue, Gibson) - leaking tanks in the SM nearly caused the mission to be cut short. Management elected instead to make preparation to use the standby rescue vehicle.
Apollo Soyuz Test Project - During landing, crew error resulting in filling the cockpit with toxic fumes from fuel being vented from the reaction control system. The crew managed to vent the spacecraft, postflight investigations show that gas levels just shy of lethal were reached in the cockpit.
The article would be more interesting - if it were an actual article rather than a rant about how Amazon won't grant them unlimited access to Amazon's customers. (Which is their right dammit! They've spent a million dollars!)
My only guess is they don't have a lot of excess capacity on the ISS and so lack the power to run with this.
They have the spare power - they don't have the luxury of being able to remain in one attitude long enough for the tether to make a difference. (Not to mention that many of the engineering aspects of tether propulsion remain elusive and unsolved.)
The microwave in his KITCHEN probaly puts more energy into his field than that tower would, not to mention the dozens of sattelites beaming down microwave radiation as well.
More scientific illiteracy of the variety the grandparent was complaining about. (And as usual, on Slashdot it rates a "+5 Informative".)
If the microwave in his kitchen did that - he would be significantly effected by standing next to it each time he nuked a midnight snack. (Remember radiation level drops off as per the Inverse square law, not to mention the shielding effect of the walls of his house.) The same goes for satellites - if they put that much power down, then your cell phone would be useless because of the high background noise. (You have noticed they use dishes to concentrate the signals, no?)
Also, if the atmosphere was THAT good at shielding that radiation, then why would Microwave solar orbital power even be a consideration? If the atmosphere only blocks 30% of visible light, but far more microwave was blocked, then how would that system be a net gain?
Because those orbital power stations use a frequency that is attenuated less by the atmosphere. (And the problem isn't really the atmosphere per se, but dust and moisture.)
I can't look at the economics - because there aren't any economics to looks at, only theories based on some questionable assumptions.
Like this one: The launch loop will, unlike any other significant project ever, come in at or under budget and at or under schedule. Or this one: That it will generate sufficient revenue in the first year(s) of operation to pay not only operating overhead, but also interest and principal. (Highly doubtful as there isn't any backlog of payloads sitting around waiting for launch - it will take years for the demand to build.)
Or the most questionable assumption of all: That it can actually be built and will operate as designed.
However, it might be nice to see if this sort of learning could cause a cultural shift that might alleviate that drudgery. Hrm.
We can already see the effects of ongoing attempts to make learning 'fun' and 'relevant'. We don't need to turn ideas known to be stupid up to 11.
When i was in a self paced program i was almost a full year ahead of my peers. When i went back to the regular school system i was a D student. i wonder what i could have done in a system that accommodated me.
It's not how you do in school that matters - its how you do in the real world.
Wonderful - a new generation of special snowflakes who will grow up expecting to be pandered to and for everything to be 'fun'. They'll have a rude awakening when they discover how fun mopping the floor at McTGIBurger at midnight is.
I never got past level 20 in City of Heroes (and that was on the villain side). Already I see things in Champions Online that fix the problems I saw in CoH, without getting rid of most of the good stuff. Ie, none of those stupid randomized missions that all turn out to be exactly the same.
The quests feel much more story based, rather than running back to some newspaper reporter to get a scoop for the next mission (or at least the quests rise to the level of comic books, don't expect LotRO).
It sounds like you never learned to properly use the contact system in CoX - you should (even redside) rarely have to use the paper missions except to get a new contact. (Who then gives you the story based missions.)
I don't defend Somali pirates, but people forget that it originated from fishers trying to get illegal dumpers to leave the area, then to try to get compensation for what the dumpers did. This doesn't justify piracy, but it does give lie to the notion that they lack a legitimate grievance and are simply out for money, and it helps to explain why they enjoy such support from Somalians.
Horseshit. Piracy has been a problem in that area for decades, even centuries. (Many people mistakenly believe it is a recent problem because it has only recently made the news.)
People out to get dumpers to leave the area attack dumpers in the area. People out for money take hostages, attack any ships in the vicinity, and deliberately sail far out to sea to reach the shipping lanes to target vessels that are passing by miles from the coast. (As the Somali pirates have done.)
Is it possible that these mafia people are stupid? Imagine we can reprocess nuclear waste, in many of the ways that slashdotters will include below. Now this nuclear waste conveniently stored underwater, is fuel that we can use to power our toys with.
Most 'nuclear waste' isn't nuclear material, it's contaminated gloves, clothing, tools, etc... Of that portion that is actually nuclear material, most of it isn't usable as fuel. (It is not fissile.)
What you are thinking of is "spent fuel rods", which isn't the same thing at all.
It always drives me crazy that there are organizations that will burn or throw away or sequester potentially useful materials. Sure mercury is poisonous. Extract it from your waste, and sell it to someone that needs it. The same with CO2, and even radon. I wonder about gold production from mining landfills.
Most such materials are thrown away because it is not economically viable to reprocess the waste to extract the small quantities of useful materials contained within.
No, gamers call anything they perceive as a nerf a nerf. Even if the nerfed thing was obviously spectacularly broken.
I remember back when I played UO, the devs released a tame that a) anyone could control, and b) was equivalent in combat power to tames that normally required a fair amount of taming skills (I.E. would normally pretty much require a dedicated tamer). Within hours of the release the devs stated that it was broken and would be fixed - yet, when they did a week later, the cries of 'nerf' were spectacularly loud.
XCOR has 66 manned rocket flights to its credit (the largest share of manned rocket flights worldwide since 2000.)
But those are rocket powered airplane flights - not at all the type of flight usually considered when discussing space access.
Virgin/Scaled has SS1, Armadillo and Masten have a large number of VTVL flights under their belt and years of hardware development.
Comparing these, and XCOR's work, to actual booster hardware is roughly as useful as comparing someone with a homebuilt go kart to a company building NASCAR racers and cars capable of threatening the land speed record - they simply aren't in the same league. They aren't even close.
Slashdot Mirror
There is - the South of Japan is (relatively) cool and very mountainous. It's harder for plant to get a toehold and harder for them to spread widely. Meanwhile, the American South is warm and relatively flat - a virtual microwave oven for plant growth.
WWI : 30+ million.
WWII: 50+ million.
4 million isn't even close.
Except that the US didn't, as outline, in TFA have a similiar system... And what the GP describes is considerably different from Perimeter.
Oh, I know that Carey - we've discussed it often enough on alt.war.nuclear after all.
Of course you won't go into details - because the system you described never existed. It sounds more like you're confused (very confused) about how ABNCP/TACAMO or the ERCS worked.
In fact, US policy was to keep man-in-the-loop to the lowest operational levels possible in order to prevent a 'Dead Hand' scenario. Strategic policy (implicit from the 60's and explicit from the 80's) was to prepare for nuclear war fighting, not 'wargasm'. Furthermore, it was US policy was to publicize such things - because (as TFA correctly points out) deterrence doesn't work if the other side doesn't know its supposed to be deterred.
Many people not familiar with either the psychology of deterrence or with how the systems worked are so amazed.
The reason nobody talks about Perimeter is that it is largely the creation of Yarynich and Blair... A neat piece of semi fiction largely believable in the era immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, but increasingly irrelevant ever since. The rest of the world has moved on, but like the one trick ponies they are Yarynich and Blair keep flogging the same dead horse. (Well, most of the rest of the world has moved on - there's still a thriving industry in creative semi fiction about the Cold War.)
Not really, because then you need some nasty chemicals painted onto your heat exchanger to keep sea weed and barnacles from growing on it.
Paint the heat exchanger with poison, poison the water coming into the heat exchanger, it's the same either way - because if you don't, and it's in contact with seawater, something is going to try to attach itself to it and grow.
Not to mention pumping low pressure water down into the ocean depths is going to require considerable wall thickness to prevent the pipe from being crushed. Or you can use a high pressure system, with fairly thick walls to prevent the shallow and above the water portions from exploding.
'Get back to their roots'? Are you kidding? The only thing that's changed is the age of the fanboy Marvel is marketing to.
Pity the poor admins - having to actually [shudder] do what their boss wants rather than having the boss catering to their whims and biases.
I agree the useful life time of some tools are cut short by technology and progress. My point is that when it comes to programming languages, their useful life often seems determined not by technology and progress, but by 'technology' and 'progress'. By marketing speak, popularity, and fads.
It would be interesting to see a graph of the ages of the languages people use/encounter (even, as with COBOL, unwittingly). I expect it would be an inverse bell curve, perhaps even a bathtub curve with steep walls at each end...
It would serve as a powerful lesson for language developers and programmers to quit mucking around with the latest 'paradigms' and programming fads and to concentrate on systems that Simply Just Work.
For that matter, other than the Apollo 1 fire and the Apollo 13 fire/explosion (and maybe the computer faults on 11) - most people aren't even aware of the multitude and magnitude of the failures experienced during Apollo.
For example:
Severe vibration were also encountered on 11 and 12 but never reached dangerous levels. A fix was available in time for 13's flight, but management elected not to delay the flight to retrofit the fix into the booster.
Why would scaling up the programming staff fix those problems? How do you they aren't design problems from elsewhere in the hierarchy?
If it's in the public domain - then by definition the site you downloaded it from is legit.
The article would be more interesting - if it were an actual article rather than a rant about how Amazon won't grant them unlimited access to Amazon's customers. (Which is their right dammit! They've spent a million dollars!)
They have the spare power - they don't have the luxury of being able to remain in one attitude long enough for the tether to make a difference. (Not to mention that many of the engineering aspects of tether propulsion remain elusive and unsolved.)
More scientific illiteracy of the variety the grandparent was complaining about. (And as usual, on Slashdot it rates a "+5 Informative".)
If the microwave in his kitchen did that - he would be significantly effected by standing next to it each time he nuked a midnight snack. (Remember radiation level drops off as per the Inverse square law, not to mention the shielding effect of the walls of his house.) The same goes for satellites - if they put that much power down, then your cell phone would be useless because of the high background noise. (You have noticed they use dishes to concentrate the signals, no?)
Because those orbital power stations use a frequency that is attenuated less by the atmosphere. (And the problem isn't really the atmosphere per se, but dust and moisture.)
I can't look at the economics - because there aren't any economics to looks at, only theories based on some questionable assumptions.
Like this one: The launch loop will, unlike any other significant project ever, come in at or under budget and at or under schedule. Or this one: That it will generate sufficient revenue in the first year(s) of operation to pay not only operating overhead, but also interest and principal. (Highly doubtful as there isn't any backlog of payloads sitting around waiting for launch - it will take years for the demand to build.)
Or the most questionable assumption of all: That it can actually be built and will operate as designed.
We can already see the effects of ongoing attempts to make learning 'fun' and 'relevant'. We don't need to turn ideas known to be stupid up to 11.
It's not how you do in school that matters - its how you do in the real world.
Wonderful - a new generation of special snowflakes who will grow up expecting to be pandered to and for everything to be 'fun'. They'll have a rude awakening when they discover how fun mopping the floor at McTGIBurger at midnight is.
It sounds like you never learned to properly use the contact system in CoX - you should (even redside) rarely have to use the paper missions except to get a new contact. (Who then gives you the story based missions.)
Horseshit. Piracy has been a problem in that area for decades, even centuries. (Many people mistakenly believe it is a recent problem because it has only recently made the news.)
People out to get dumpers to leave the area attack dumpers in the area. People out for money take hostages, attack any ships in the vicinity, and deliberately sail far out to sea to reach the shipping lanes to target vessels that are passing by miles from the coast. (As the Somali pirates have done.)
Most 'nuclear waste' isn't nuclear material, it's contaminated gloves, clothing, tools, etc... Of that portion that is actually nuclear material, most of it isn't usable as fuel. (It is not fissile.)
What you are thinking of is "spent fuel rods", which isn't the same thing at all.
Most such materials are thrown away because it is not economically viable to reprocess the waste to extract the small quantities of useful materials contained within.
No, gamers call anything they perceive as a nerf a nerf. Even if the nerfed thing was obviously spectacularly broken.
I remember back when I played UO, the devs released a tame that a) anyone could control, and b) was equivalent in combat power to tames that normally required a fair amount of taming skills (I.E. would normally pretty much require a dedicated tamer). Within hours of the release the devs stated that it was broken and would be fixed - yet, when they did a week later, the cries of 'nerf' were spectacularly loud.
Missed this the first time around...
But those are rocket powered airplane flights - not at all the type of flight usually considered when discussing space access.
Comparing these, and XCOR's work, to actual booster hardware is roughly as useful as comparing someone with a homebuilt go kart to a company building NASCAR racers and cars capable of threatening the land speed record - they simply aren't in the same league. They aren't even close.