Not it's not. The average CF on the ground is between 15 and 30%, which means the advantage in space is less than 7 even for poor-efficiency installs like the 15% CF on my garage roof in Toronto.
> Launch costs - The point of using local energy
Oh come on, you think you can launch an entire industry to the moon for less money than just building the panels here on Earth?
> Communications satellites typically last 15 years
Gradually dying all the time. That goes directly into the CF of a SPS.
> Expensive transmission systems
The rectenna costs not much less than the same field covered with PV panels, let alone the transmitter. When you then add in the 50% end-to-end losses, they *are* expensive.
> This is the correct answer today. Launch costs
It has almost nothing to do with launch costs. A panel in space will deliver the same amount of power to the grid over its lifetime as a panel on the ground. If the launch cost is more expensive than zero, it's more expensive. Period.
> You laugh and it's a rather traditional joke around here but it *does* look like they're getting closer and closer
No, they are not. If you apply the "capitalism filter", they are further from success than ever. Much further.
The problem isn't fusion, which continues to develop. The problem is that *so did everything else*. During the last 40 years, fusion devices got WAY more expensive and harder to keep running. Meanwhile, the price of a PV panel dropped over 100 times.
Basically, even if fusion were to work tomorrow, building costs would mean it could not *ever* be competitive with, say, a wind turbine. And I mean *ever*.
> The funky looking machine the Germans are building
Has no hope at all. It is basically the same level of development that tokamaks were in the 1980s. There is widespread understanding that it produces a system that is *slightly* cheaper than a tokamak, but still orders of magnitude more expensive than existing sources.
> We see ground based solar getting less than 10:1 with 2:1 being common
No it's not. The *worst* panels, the normal poly-Si ones you see on the market, have an EROI of 4 years, and an expected lifetime of 40 years. Actually all evidence to date suggests the lifetime is 60 to 100 years, but we can't say for sure because modern panels only started being built in the 1970s. That's the *worst* case, the other technologies like thin-film are better.
Please, stop spreading FUD. You're hurting the world.
"The concept of space based solar power has been around for decades"
The IDIOTIC concept you mean. Anyone with a calculator, let alone Google, can demonstrate how RIDICULOUSLY MORONIC this idea is. Sorry for the caps, but in this case that are appropriate. Here, try it yourself:
This is not going to change, even if these are rare events. When these rare events occur, it's not a single-occupant car getting hit, they wipe out multiple people. The risk factor is multiplied, and that's precisely why they started doing this in the first place. And it happens all the time, Google it yourself and you'll find dozens of examples in the last couple years.
"allow the driver to start while someone is still at the front paying"
A far better solution to this problem is to remove cash payments and require some form of automatic payment. Place ticket machines at the larger stops, and accept some form of NFC solution that's fast. If people hate buying tickets at the street, or there isn't one at their stop, they can get a free reloadable card. Don't like it? Tough.
"allow buses to drive 25mph on the shoulder of the highway"
Thereby blocking emergency traffic if they break down. There's a reason you're not allowed to drive on shoulders, and a bus would make that problem even worse. There are, however, places where the shoulders are wide enough that a bus won't block both it and the lane beside it, and in those cases they already use it - like on the DVP in Toronto.
"leave (city) bus doors open, allowing people to get on and off any time at their own risk"
So the bus might randomly start up while someone is getting off, and we'll just accept the resulting lawsuit?
Is this guy mad?
Beyond all of these seemingly ridiculous suggestions is the elephant in the room: the reason busses are slower isn't because they are physically slower, as anyone that's ridden a modern bus on the highway will be aware. It's because *they stop all the time*. You can make busses (et all) run much, much faster if you remove stops.
But we know from a century of statistics gathering that if you do so *less people will use it* because they are unbelievably lazy about walking to stops. For instance, when I lived downtown there was a bus stop one block south of me. The terminus of that route was a subway station that was three blocks south of me. You could see the station from the stop. Yet there were always lineups of people waiting at that stop, even in the rain. And since the bus ran every 15 minutes during rush and every 30 off rush, they were waiting much longer than the time that it would take to walk to the station, 2 or 3 minutes, tops. And I'm not talking people who might have locomotion problems, mostly it was people my age or younger.
This is the typical case, not the uncommon one. You can see it anywhere. If you add space to get the busses moving faster, people just won't use it. And that defeats the entire point of his concept. Anyone writing on this topic should be perfectly aware of this, and if he isn't, why is he writing about it?!
Winner of the "Most Hilarious Chinglish Website" award. Utterly indecipherable. Try to find product details, it leads to a 3rd party review at Nerdbench.
I own a Odroid C1+ I intended to use as a mini network television appliance - basically a home-brew Tablo. I had convinced myself that since it ran a recent-looking version of Ubuntu, and that version supported my USB tuner stick, I was good to go.
In fact, the OS for the C1+ is a weird hybrid of a very old kernel (3.10 IIRC) and somewhat newer, but still oldish, user-space code. For those new to this, the current kernel is 4.4.4, and 3.10 was released in June 2013. This kernel dates from before the gigantic LinuxTV merge in 3.16, which means that practically no video of any sort works out of the box. You can install things like VLC and/or Kodi and get video that way, but almost all devices - cameras, tuners, etc. - will not work out of the box. In contrast, almost all of these will work out of the box on the RPi.
A much larger issue is the lack of hardware compression/decompression. The Mali 450 is a powerful GPU, much faster than the one in the RPi, but lacks any API for this sort of codec support. The AmLogic CPU does include a "VPU" system, basically a SIMD unit, but the API is proprietary. I am aware of only one program that uses it, Kodi, where it is supported by code in the Kodi stack itself. This code is not available to other programs, like ffmpeg or gstreamer. In contrast, the RPi has widespread codec support, although you have to buy the 264 license key.
So, if you are doing anything video-like other than bare Kodi, the C1+ is *not a good product*. Your hardware probably won't work, and if you get lucky and it does, the performance will be very poor. On my C1+, x264 compresses at ~10 FPS, while an RPi, ostensibly much slower, manages about 25.
"The reason Blackberry went under has absolutely nothing to do with it opening up the platform to the government"
Indeed. In fact, one can clearly point to the *exact second* where BB died.
You've all seen the 2007 iPhone "are you getting it" moment, right? Well when Lazaridis showed that to Balsillie the day after the intro, Balsillie somehow managed to utterly fail to understand that the technology was better. When Lazaridis pointed out they had a real browser, Balsillie's takeaway was that Apple had a better deal with AT&T. It was entirely viewed through the lens of carrier incentives. And that was something he knew about, and geared up to come up with better license deals. That they also needed a better phone never crossed his mind.
A few days later he was quoted in the Canadian press saying something along the lines of "Apple doesn't know phones". I knew they were dead.
The commercial value of a paper is likely used up entirely in the first three months after publication. There is, of course, exceptions to the rule, but they likely represent less than 1% of all papers, more likely 0.001%. After some point, giving them away for free is less expensive than running the paywall.
The same is true for the music industry. Producing a new single is not cheap, you have to pay a lot of people in the food chain. Yet the value of the song burns out in a few weeks, at the most. Even big hits last a month or two, tops. There are counterexamples, like the Beatles and Miles, but these are 0.001% of the market.
In both cases we see ever longer copyright and ever more greedy businesses trying to squeeze out the last penny of something that is essentially worthless. It's sad to watch.
I write a lot about the history of tech, old computers and radars and such. Most of that is recorded in older journals, like the IEEE and ACM. They continue to charge $30 or more per copy for papers from the 1950s.
For instance, J. Presper Eckert wrote a paper on early storage mechanisms in the early 1950s. About half of them were never used in production, and the other half stopped being used in the 1970s at the latest. That paper has exactly zero commercial value, yet they still charge $30 for it.
> as I said they are doing amazingly profit wise, actual marketshare though is under 15%
So their market share is double digits, but everyone else put together's profit share is single digit. I'm sure Google would love to have this "problem".
And don't fool yourself, this *is* a problem. If online ad buys ever crater, licensing Android is *not* going to pay for its development.
> If Android finally cleans its act up to the point where it is as good as the hardware it is running on then Apple will suffer
I'd say the two have been competitive for some time now, and certainly the latest Samsung gear is *extremely* competitive. So we'll see if you're right - I don't believe it for a second, I think Apple is a brand and Samsung is a sticker on the box you pick because it costs less.
> John Boyd, bless his hyper-competitive heart, was bitterly disappointed that they watered down his flight model on
Was he? Or was he just saying that because he was sidelined early?
I ask because I recall another member of the fmafia recently making some rather odd counter-factual statements that led me to question the entire story.
> Why do so many people on the Internet associate CAS with slow-turning gun runs? Because every article on the A-10 puts considerable attention on the gun. Because it's cool, and big, and heavy and BIG IS BETTER!
Which is a bit sad, because it's not a terribly effective weapon on today's battlefield. Against T-54/55's it's certainly credible on the sides and turret roof, but that's about it. It can pen under 60mm from 1000m range, but a T-64 has 45mm in the turret roof and considerably more than than everywhere else, including the sides and rear. Against applique, composite or reactive armor,or against anything newer than the 1970s, it's not particularly useful. If you do need to penetrate anything newer than that, you'll need at least a CRV7 and much more likely a Hellfire or Brimstone. All of those have less dispersion (or zero), higher pen, and weight a whole lot less.
Now of course the GAU is very effective against anything lighter than that, including APC/IFVs, arty, logistics, what have you. But those don't need a GAU to kill, something like a BK27 is just as useful and weights a little over 1/3rd as much, not including the ammo can or feeds. That 180 kg represents four Hellfires, which is a lot more dead tanks than the GAU.
My basic point is that if you lay out all the various targets you might face in CAS and rank them on a line from soft to hard, there is a point somewhere on that line where the GAU stops being effective. And the vast majority of those targets lie on the softer end of the point. Now you could slide that point up or down with different weapons. But to slide it up you have to a LONG WAY before you add even more more target it can hurt. But if you slide it the other way, you might remove only one target while still leaving overall numbers unchanged.
"The 2015 report criticized the F-35’s lack of power and maneuverability compared to the F-16 during high angle of attack exercises. The F-35 “was at a distinct energy disadvantage in a turning fight,” the author wrote, also noting that “pitch rates were too slow to prosecute or deny weapons.”
In contrast, Hanche wrote the F-35 is capable of a significantly higher angle of attack than the F-16, providing the pilot greater authority to point the nose of the airplane wherever he wants."
These two statements are in no way related. The first two issues are about energy loading and pitch rates. The second is about angle of attack. They are in no way related other than grossly. While it is true that high-alpha maneuvers are useful in obtaining snapshots, as a general indication of maneuverability they are not very informative.
That someone writing for DefenseNews isn't aware of, or at least doesn't comment on, this key difference in statements is rather worrying.
As an owner of a C1+ who was convinced to get it because of the advantages noted here, let me just put out a little warning...
The ODroid is certainly an excellent machine, with excellent performance for the price. It is, however, only usable for the most mainstream uses - web servers, etc.
That's because the OS for the C series is maintained by ODroid, and is based on a *very old kernel*, old as in something like four or five years. They have ported the upper layers of the OS onto it, so that's only two or three years old. The result is a bizarre hybrid system that is highly outdated in terms of hardware support.
So if you, like I, are looking for something that you'll plug hardware into, please make absolutely sure you talk to someone with that hardware plugged into that board. If you do not, you may convince yourself, as I did, that it will work only to find nothing does. In my case, I wanted to run TVHeadend with a U235 stick, which is fully supported by Linux versions older than what comes on the C+. However, the kernel itself is older and has no drivers for almost the entire LinuxTV stack.
Then to top it all off, there are no APIs for the processor's media acceleration facilities, so all media flows through the basic processor. This actually ends up making it many times slower than a RPi at basic video tasks, in spite of being much more powerful on paper.
Support is basically self-hosting. There are some really great guys in the forums, but don't expect anything even remotely like the level of self-support you might see on the RPi boards.
So basically, if you know *exactly* what you want to do with it, and *know for a fact* it works, the ODroid's are great. If not, I would strongly recommend buying a RPi.
> So there you go, that's why I think people are so in favour of Trump
Absolutely. The question is not "why Trump" as much as "why the rest of the party can't do anything about it". There is utter dread in the GOP, although that might have been replaced by resignation by this morning, and yet they haven't managed to do a thing.
> The established parties (doesn't really matter which) just keep on offering more and more of the same
I don't think one can possibly consider Bernie to be "more of the same". Yet in spite of this, he's losing. That likely speaks more to the general malaise quotient - I think the average dem is less mad with the world than the average gop, but that might not be surprising given that the dems have the WH.
> It's interesting because I know 0% of democrats will vote for Trump and I've seen *recent* polls (on 538.com) > showing that 47% of republicans will stay home rather than vote for Trump
But what is the number that wouldn't vote for one of the others?
> OTH, the 35% who hate Hillary and would never vote for her are mostly republican anyway.
I'm not sure about that. I do however, *believe* that the numbers are in her favour in this respect. That is, the number of traditional republicans who won't vote would be much higher than the number of dems who would do the same. This, IMHO, will be magnified by the Trump hatred - a lot of people will turn up to vote against him, it's not clear there will be a significant number who will do the same against Hillary.
So maybe the reform vote doesn't get to vote for Bernie, but they might destroy the lunatic fringe of the GOP. What would come of that would be interesting to see.
> actually much better for the environment that producing solar panels
No it isn't, as has been widely and repeatedly demonstrated.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf
> massive amounts of energy and dangerous chemicals
Neither is true. A cleanser used in the factory is a hazardous material, but it is contained within the factory (unless you believe the stories from China) and has no downstream risk.
> We actually replaced two electric furnaces in our house with a pair of coal stoves
Which isn't clean coal by any means. However, given that heating coal is actually rather hard to get in lots of places these days I'm guessing you're writing from Ireland or the UK. Having been coal heated in the former, and having to suffer through continuous asthma as a result, anyone describing coal as clean is having a serious case of cognitive dissonance, is lying, is a shill, a troll, or some combination thereof.
Slashdot Mirror
And I forgot to do that login before posting that. And then installed AdBlock.
Since then I've had a single page reload - with that exception it's been very fast to use.
"Boom is meant to start test flights next year out of John Denver's old hangar"
So far they have a computer rendering and a plywood cockpit mockup, and they plan to test next year? Suuuuuure they will.
> Actually, the ratio is 7:1 in space
Not it's not. The average CF on the ground is between 15 and 30%, which means the advantage in space is less than 7 even for poor-efficiency installs like the 15% CF on my garage roof in Toronto.
> Launch costs - The point of using local energy
Oh come on, you think you can launch an entire industry to the moon for less money than just building the panels here on Earth?
> Communications satellites typically last 15 years
Gradually dying all the time. That goes directly into the CF of a SPS.
> Expensive transmission systems
The rectenna costs not much less than the same field covered with PV panels, let alone the transmitter. When you then add in the 50% end-to-end losses, they *are* expensive.
> This is the correct answer today. Launch costs
It has almost nothing to do with launch costs. A panel in space will deliver the same amount of power to the grid over its lifetime as a panel on the ground. If the launch cost is more expensive than zero, it's more expensive. Period.
> You laugh and it's a rather traditional joke around here but it *does* look like they're getting closer and closer
No, they are not. If you apply the "capitalism filter", they are further from success than ever. Much further.
The problem isn't fusion, which continues to develop. The problem is that *so did everything else*. During the last 40 years, fusion devices got WAY more expensive and harder to keep running. Meanwhile, the price of a PV panel dropped over 100 times.
Basically, even if fusion were to work tomorrow, building costs would mean it could not *ever* be competitive with, say, a wind turbine. And I mean *ever*.
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/
> The funky looking machine the Germans are building
Has no hope at all. It is basically the same level of development that tokamaks were in the 1980s. There is widespread understanding that it produces a system that is *slightly* cheaper than a tokamak, but still orders of magnitude more expensive than existing sources.
> We see ground based solar getting less than 10:1 with 2:1 being common
No it's not. The *worst* panels, the normal poly-Si ones you see on the market, have an EROI of 4 years, and an expected lifetime of 40 years. Actually all evidence to date suggests the lifetime is 60 to 100 years, but we can't say for sure because modern panels only started being built in the 1970s. That's the *worst* case, the other technologies like thin-film are better.
Please, stop spreading FUD. You're hurting the world.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf
"The concept of space based solar power has been around for decades"
The IDIOTIC concept you mean. Anyone with a calculator, let alone Google, can demonstrate how RIDICULOUSLY MORONIC this idea is. Sorry for the caps, but in this case that are appropriate. Here, try it yourself:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/the-maury-equation-redux/
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/lunacy/
"With government driving up the cost of labor, it's driving down the number of jobs," he says"
Yeah, and to back that up we link to an article he wrote.
Does anyone here believe for even a second he wouldn't replace these same jobs even if they got cheaper?
> . A very few, with iron discipline, will walk out
If they actually are evaluating their odds, they're not at the table in the first place. Duh.
I'm going to address the problem as a whole at the bottom, but I'll start by pointing out some specifics that suggest this guy is clueless:
"Suggestions include not to require buses to stop and open their doors at railroad crossings"
Recently a bus in Ottawa failed to do this, for an unknown reason, and was hit by a train, killing six people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_bus-train_crash
This is not going to change, even if these are rare events. When these rare events occur, it's not a single-occupant car getting hit, they wipe out multiple people. The risk factor is multiplied, and that's precisely why they started doing this in the first place. And it happens all the time, Google it yourself and you'll find dozens of examples in the last couple years.
"allow the driver to start while someone is still at the front paying"
A far better solution to this problem is to remove cash payments and require some form of automatic payment. Place ticket machines at the larger stops, and accept some form of NFC solution that's fast. If people hate buying tickets at the street, or there isn't one at their stop, they can get a free reloadable card. Don't like it? Tough.
"allow buses to drive 25mph on the shoulder of the highway"
Thereby blocking emergency traffic if they break down. There's a reason you're not allowed to drive on shoulders, and a bus would make that problem even worse. There are, however, places where the shoulders are wide enough that a bus won't block both it and the lane beside it, and in those cases they already use it - like on the DVP in Toronto.
"leave (city) bus doors open, allowing people to get on and off any time at their own risk"
So the bus might randomly start up while someone is getting off, and we'll just accept the resulting lawsuit?
Is this guy mad?
Beyond all of these seemingly ridiculous suggestions is the elephant in the room: the reason busses are slower isn't because they are physically slower, as anyone that's ridden a modern bus on the highway will be aware. It's because *they stop all the time*. You can make busses (et all) run much, much faster if you remove stops.
But we know from a century of statistics gathering that if you do so *less people will use it* because they are unbelievably lazy about walking to stops. For instance, when I lived downtown there was a bus stop one block south of me. The terminus of that route was a subway station that was three blocks south of me. You could see the station from the stop. Yet there were always lineups of people waiting at that stop, even in the rain. And since the bus ran every 15 minutes during rush and every 30 off rush, they were waiting much longer than the time that it would take to walk to the station, 2 or 3 minutes, tops. And I'm not talking people who might have locomotion problems, mostly it was people my age or younger.
This is the typical case, not the uncommon one. You can see it anywhere. If you add space to get the busses moving faster, people just won't use it. And that defeats the entire point of his concept. Anyone writing on this topic should be perfectly aware of this, and if he isn't, why is he writing about it?!
> I got one of the Cubieboard SBCs.
Winner of the "Most Hilarious Chinglish Website" award. Utterly indecipherable. Try to find product details, it leads to a 3rd party review at Nerdbench.
As I posted previously:
I own a Odroid C1+ I intended to use as a mini network television appliance - basically a home-brew Tablo. I had convinced myself that since it ran a recent-looking version of Ubuntu, and that version supported my USB tuner stick, I was good to go.
In fact, the OS for the C1+ is a weird hybrid of a very old kernel (3.10 IIRC) and somewhat newer, but still oldish, user-space code. For those new to this, the current kernel is 4.4.4, and 3.10 was released in June 2013. This kernel dates from before the gigantic LinuxTV merge in 3.16, which means that practically no video of any sort works out of the box. You can install things like VLC and/or Kodi and get video that way, but almost all devices - cameras, tuners, etc. - will not work out of the box. In contrast, almost all of these will work out of the box on the RPi.
A much larger issue is the lack of hardware compression/decompression. The Mali 450 is a powerful GPU, much faster than the one in the RPi, but lacks any API for this sort of codec support. The AmLogic CPU does include a "VPU" system, basically a SIMD unit, but the API is proprietary. I am aware of only one program that uses it, Kodi, where it is supported by code in the Kodi stack itself. This code is not available to other programs, like ffmpeg or gstreamer. In contrast, the RPi has widespread codec support, although you have to buy the 264 license key.
So, if you are doing anything video-like other than bare Kodi, the C1+ is *not a good product*. Your hardware probably won't work, and if you get lucky and it does, the performance will be very poor. On my C1+, x264 compresses at ~10 FPS, while an RPi, ostensibly much slower, manages about 25.
"The reason Blackberry went under has absolutely nothing to do with it opening up the platform to the government"
Indeed. In fact, one can clearly point to the *exact second* where BB died.
You've all seen the 2007 iPhone "are you getting it" moment, right? Well when Lazaridis showed that to Balsillie the day after the intro, Balsillie somehow managed to utterly fail to understand that the technology was better. When Lazaridis pointed out they had a real browser, Balsillie's takeaway was that Apple had a better deal with AT&T. It was entirely viewed through the lens of carrier incentives. And that was something he knew about, and geared up to come up with better license deals. That they also needed a better phone never crossed his mind.
A few days later he was quoted in the Canadian press saying something along the lines of "Apple doesn't know phones". I knew they were dead.
> Those who decry the cost of publication
The commercial value of a paper is likely used up entirely in the first three months after publication. There is, of course, exceptions to the rule, but they likely represent less than 1% of all papers, more likely 0.001%. After some point, giving them away for free is less expensive than running the paywall.
The same is true for the music industry. Producing a new single is not cheap, you have to pay a lot of people in the food chain. Yet the value of the song burns out in a few weeks, at the most. Even big hits last a month or two, tops. There are counterexamples, like the Beatles and Miles, but these are 0.001% of the market.
In both cases we see ever longer copyright and ever more greedy businesses trying to squeeze out the last penny of something that is essentially worthless. It's sad to watch.
I write a lot about the history of tech, old computers and radars and such. Most of that is recorded in older journals, like the IEEE and ACM. They continue to charge $30 or more per copy for papers from the 1950s.
For instance, J. Presper Eckert wrote a paper on early storage mechanisms in the early 1950s. About half of them were never used in production, and the other half stopped being used in the 1970s at the latest. That paper has exactly zero commercial value, yet they still charge $30 for it.
Wankers.
> as I said they are doing amazingly profit wise, actual marketshare though is under 15%
So their market share is double digits, but everyone else put together's profit share is single digit. I'm sure Google would love to have this "problem".
And don't fool yourself, this *is* a problem. If online ad buys ever crater, licensing Android is *not* going to pay for its development.
> If Android finally cleans its act up to the point where it is as good as the hardware it is running on then Apple will suffer
I'd say the two have been competitive for some time now, and certainly the latest Samsung gear is *extremely* competitive. So we'll see if you're right - I don't believe it for a second, I think Apple is a brand and Samsung is a sticker on the box you pick because it costs less.
> John Boyd, bless his hyper-competitive heart, was bitterly disappointed that they watered down his flight model on
Was he? Or was he just saying that because he was sidelined early?
I ask because I recall another member of the fmafia recently making some rather odd counter-factual statements that led me to question the entire story.
"if you rip a few pennies off from tens of thousands of people you are less likely to be noticed than if you rip thousands off from a few."
Great, now come up with a way to fix the entire planet so this is no longer true, and you're off to the races. Let me know when you're ready.
"32,000 Workers At Fukushima No. 1 "
Stop right there: there were 32,000 Workers At Fukushima No. 1?
> Why do so many people on the Internet associate CAS with slow-turning gun runs?
Because every article on the A-10 puts considerable attention on the gun. Because it's cool, and big, and heavy and BIG IS BETTER!
Which is a bit sad, because it's not a terribly effective weapon on today's battlefield. Against T-54/55's it's certainly credible on the sides and turret roof, but that's about it. It can pen under 60mm from 1000m range, but a T-64 has 45mm in the turret roof and considerably more than than everywhere else, including the sides and rear. Against applique, composite or reactive armor,or against anything newer than the 1970s, it's not particularly useful. If you do need to penetrate anything newer than that, you'll need at least a CRV7 and much more likely a Hellfire or Brimstone. All of those have less dispersion (or zero), higher pen, and weight a whole lot less.
Now of course the GAU is very effective against anything lighter than that, including APC/IFVs, arty, logistics, what have you. But those don't need a GAU to kill, something like a BK27 is just as useful and weights a little over 1/3rd as much, not including the ammo can or feeds. That 180 kg represents four Hellfires, which is a lot more dead tanks than the GAU.
My basic point is that if you lay out all the various targets you might face in CAS and rank them on a line from soft to hard, there is a point somewhere on that line where the GAU stops being effective. And the vast majority of those targets lie on the softer end of the point. Now you could slide that point up or down with different weapons. But to slide it up you have to a LONG WAY before you add even more more target it can hurt. But if you slide it the other way, you might remove only one target while still leaving overall numbers unchanged.
From the original article:
"The 2015 report criticized the F-35’s lack of power and maneuverability compared to the F-16 during high angle of attack exercises. The F-35 “was at a distinct energy disadvantage in a turning fight,” the author wrote, also noting that “pitch rates were too slow to prosecute or deny weapons.”
In contrast, Hanche wrote the F-35 is capable of a significantly higher angle of attack than the F-16, providing the pilot greater authority to point the nose of the airplane wherever he wants."
These two statements are in no way related. The first two issues are about energy loading and pitch rates. The second is about angle of attack. They are in no way related other than grossly. While it is true that high-alpha maneuvers are useful in obtaining snapshots, as a general indication of maneuverability they are not very informative.
That someone writing for DefenseNews isn't aware of, or at least doesn't comment on, this key difference in statements is rather worrying.
As an owner of a C1+ who was convinced to get it because of the advantages noted here, let me just put out a little warning...
The ODroid is certainly an excellent machine, with excellent performance for the price. It is, however, only usable for the most mainstream uses - web servers, etc.
That's because the OS for the C series is maintained by ODroid, and is based on a *very old kernel*, old as in something like four or five years. They have ported the upper layers of the OS onto it, so that's only two or three years old. The result is a bizarre hybrid system that is highly outdated in terms of hardware support.
So if you, like I, are looking for something that you'll plug hardware into, please make absolutely sure you talk to someone with that hardware plugged into that board. If you do not, you may convince yourself, as I did, that it will work only to find nothing does. In my case, I wanted to run TVHeadend with a U235 stick, which is fully supported by Linux versions older than what comes on the C+. However, the kernel itself is older and has no drivers for almost the entire LinuxTV stack.
Then to top it all off, there are no APIs for the processor's media acceleration facilities, so all media flows through the basic processor. This actually ends up making it many times slower than a RPi at basic video tasks, in spite of being much more powerful on paper.
Support is basically self-hosting. There are some really great guys in the forums, but don't expect anything even remotely like the level of self-support you might see on the RPi boards.
So basically, if you know *exactly* what you want to do with it, and *know for a fact* it works, the ODroid's are great. If not, I would strongly recommend buying a RPi.
"Google Challenge Results In Astoundingly Efficient Inverters"
Sooo, what is that number? I can't find it anywhere.
Commercial PV inverters are about 97% peak, 93% average. Not a lot of room for movement there.
> So there you go, that's why I think people are so in favour of Trump
Absolutely. The question is not "why Trump" as much as "why the rest of the party can't do anything about it". There is utter dread in the GOP, although that might have been replaced by resignation by this morning, and yet they haven't managed to do a thing.
> The established parties (doesn't really matter which) just keep on offering more and more of the same
I don't think one can possibly consider Bernie to be "more of the same". Yet in spite of this, he's losing. That likely speaks more to the general malaise quotient - I think the average dem is less mad with the world than the average gop, but that might not be surprising given that the dems have the WH.
> It's interesting because I know 0% of democrats will vote for Trump and I've seen *recent* polls (on 538.com)
> showing that 47% of republicans will stay home rather than vote for Trump
But what is the number that wouldn't vote for one of the others?
> OTH, the 35% who hate Hillary and would never vote for her are mostly republican anyway.
I'm not sure about that. I do however, *believe* that the numbers are in her favour in this respect. That is, the number of traditional republicans who won't vote would be much higher than the number of dems who would do the same. This, IMHO, will be magnified by the Trump hatred - a lot of people will turn up to vote against him, it's not clear there will be a significant number who will do the same against Hillary.
So maybe the reform vote doesn't get to vote for Bernie, but they might destroy the lunatic fringe of the GOP. What would come of that would be interesting to see.
> Clean coal technology is carbon neutral
a) it doesn't exist
b) no it isn't, obviously.
> actually much better for the environment that producing solar panels
No it isn't, as has been widely and repeatedly demonstrated.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf
> massive amounts of energy and dangerous chemicals
Neither is true. A cleanser used in the factory is a hazardous material, but it is contained within the factory (unless you believe the stories from China) and has no downstream risk.
http://solarindustrymag.com/online/issues/SI1309/FEAT_05_Hazardous_Materials_Used_In_Silicon_PV_Cell_Production_A_Primer.html
> We actually replaced two electric furnaces in our house with a pair of coal stoves
Which isn't clean coal by any means. However, given that heating coal is actually rather hard to get in lots of places these days I'm guessing you're writing from Ireland or the UK. Having been coal heated in the former, and having to suffer through continuous asthma as a result, anyone describing coal as clean is having a serious case of cognitive dissonance, is lying, is a shill, a troll, or some combination thereof.