I didn't want to invoke Godwin and was specifically avoiding WW2 - but you just proved my point for me. The King Tiger was over-engineered. While it was the only tank that could kill another tank from well over a mile away, and while it brushed off direct frontal and even side hits from T-34's and Shermans and - as you correctly acknowledged - was only vulnerable from the rear (and from the air), it weighed so much it could barely move, it had constant gearbox and engine troubles because of this, and even worse - it became hard to find bridges and roads that would take its weight - further limiting its area of operations.
This proves that engineering and technology can eventually lose sight of the forest while designing the ultimate tree. Now fast forward to today's scenario where the only real threats to America in a conventional military sense are China and Russia. The Russians tended to favor quantity over quality back in the Soviet/Warsaw Pact days. Today it seems that they have chosen a technological route similar to the US - or they can't afford/aren't organized enough to field as large a standing army as they used to. But the Chinese have proven themselves to be masters of mass production par excellence. They have the added advantage that their population is double that of Russia and the US combined. Such a population allows you so much cannon fodder that you can simply absorb the enemy's ammunition before launching your counter-attack. All they need is a good gun design and numbers, and then it just becomes a matter of time. In this philosophy survival of my tank is irrelevant - its killing enough of yours to make you ineffective, at which point I still have tanks left and win the day. Their losses would be tremendous, however the scoreboard in war was never kept by body-counts but rather by who is left standing on the valuable political or economic stuff at the end of it all.
They all provide the source code do they? Not all independent developers choose the GPL, but since we're talking about your support, how much money have you sent this year to the authors of GPLed source code that you run? Or do you support it by downloading it and using it only?
You had to go back 100 years? Tanks were brand new and no one know how to fight them, or how to fight with them. Nowadays tank-killing can be extremely cheap and cost-effective in the right terrain. A couple idiots with RKG-3's are much cheaper than a modern helicopter and a pilot who had to be trained for years, or a tank that had to be manufactured and shipped across an ocean or two. Like it as not, Iraq and Afghanistan are teaching the world that it's possible to survive against a modern army - but not by facing it head on. As always - find the weak spot and push...
It was, is, and always will be infantry. Not the dumb guy in front of you out in the open. The other guy you didn't see who threw the anti-tank grenade.
While a troop of super technological super stealthy tanks yields a great tactical advantage, this advantage is absolutely neutralized when your enemy can manufacture 50 not-so-good-but-good-enough-to-kill-you tanks to your one. All you need is defense in depth and eventually the numbers work in your favor. The US always seeks out an expensive technological approach to try to solve problems. While this can work sometimes, it sometimes results in hundred million dollar state-of-the-art planes that can't fly.
So would pilots be encouraged to make really really really hard landings in order to create more energy for the departing aircraft? And who would clean up the mess?
IANAElectrician, but if you're storing the power locally couldn't you isolate sections of the track from each other and the grid in general and have an "acceleration" track to avoid what you describe? The connection with the rest of the rail could be broken when a train is about to leave, and the flywheel + grid is fed into a predetermined length of isolated track. The train accelerates with power from the flywheel (plus some grid) and crosses onto the main track via inertia but since it's at speed already the current draw is not that much so there shouldn't be a huge change when the train switches to the main track. Likewise the decelerating train leaves the main track and pumps energy back into the flywheel system only, not the whole network.
Has anybody tried just building the stations on hills?
Yah lots of hills in downtown Manhattan. You could just knock some of those buildings down land is cheap over there I hear. Didn't they like buy the whole island for $24 or something? Or you could dig the tunnels a little deeper because it's just dirt, right? And there's no ground-water from the Hudson river to worry about when you blast your way deep enough....
Electric motors draw maximum amps at the very beginning just before they start turning. After that the draw is significantly less because resistance increases. You know, V=IR rewritten as I = V/R. The voltage is fixed, the resistance is close to zero when the motor is not turning so the amps go sky high. But only for an instant. As soon as the motor starts turning resistance picks up due to electromagnetic effects and the current draw falls. This is why you'll burn out a motor switching it on and off too quickly. You're shooting tremendous amounts of current through a non-turning motor. All that huge amount of current heats up the coils until something melts. However the 10,000 amp figure is peak, not continuous for 30 seconds. Therefore it's not fair to use that figure for calculations over a 30 second acceleration period. The amps drawn would form a curve, and for that you'd need something a little more complex than y = mx+c to figure it out, ie knowing the exact curve for those engine types/trains and some calculus.
This reminds me of the late 70's and the Cola/Burger wars. I guess a lot of it has to do with the current economic climate and declining(?) revenue, just like back in the Carter days.
The first alien ship that passes by us asks if any one wants a one way ride out to see these sights close up...I'm in.
No - because you would not go so far as to "reduce" us to insects, the insect-like aliens will just sacrifice you and place you on the giant fungal heap and you never will see those sights. I, for one, welcome our insect overlords.
I agree. Someone in the creativity department forgot to take the time to actually look at how bathrooms are designed. No one is going to stand in front of the bathroom sink for an hour (after all, we apparently spend "an hour a day in the bathroom" according to TFA) to read the news. Much more convenient to bring a portable computing device with you if you're that desperate for onthrone connectivity.
I see you're not a gamer. I've played around with a few flavors of linux, but I'm not going to give up my games for it. And yes I've tried wine, cedega, etc - give me a break. Direct X "just works", every time. I have a dual boot box and I rarely boot into linux. Just to do online banking really.
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I didn't want to invoke Godwin and was specifically avoiding WW2 - but you just proved my point for me. The King Tiger was over-engineered. While it was the only tank that could kill another tank from well over a mile away, and while it brushed off direct frontal and even side hits from T-34's and Shermans and - as you correctly acknowledged - was only vulnerable from the rear (and from the air), it weighed so much it could barely move, it had constant gearbox and engine troubles because of this, and even worse - it became hard to find bridges and roads that would take its weight - further limiting its area of operations.
This proves that engineering and technology can eventually lose sight of the forest while designing the ultimate tree. Now fast forward to today's scenario where the only real threats to America in a conventional military sense are China and Russia. The Russians tended to favor quantity over quality back in the Soviet/Warsaw Pact days. Today it seems that they have chosen a technological route similar to the US - or they can't afford/aren't organized enough to field as large a standing army as they used to. But the Chinese have proven themselves to be masters of mass production par excellence. They have the added advantage that their population is double that of Russia and the US combined. Such a population allows you so much cannon fodder that you can simply absorb the enemy's ammunition before launching your counter-attack. All they need is a good gun design and numbers, and then it just becomes a matter of time. In this philosophy survival of my tank is irrelevant - its killing enough of yours to make you ineffective, at which point I still have tanks left and win the day. Their losses would be tremendous, however the scoreboard in war was never kept by body-counts but rather by who is left standing on the valuable political or economic stuff at the end of it all.
a 30mb/s connection. Why would you want to use it to transfer your game's video instead of, uh, a DVI cable
Or better yet, instead of downloading a torrent of the game in question...
Until that I rather support indie developers.
They all provide the source code do they? Not all independent developers choose the GPL, but since we're talking about your support, how much money have you sent this year to the authors of GPLed source code that you run? Or do you support it by downloading it and using it only?
You had to go back 100 years? Tanks were brand new and no one know how to fight them, or how to fight with them. Nowadays tank-killing can be extremely cheap and cost-effective in the right terrain. A couple idiots with RKG-3's are much cheaper than a modern helicopter and a pilot who had to be trained for years, or a tank that had to be manufactured and shipped across an ocean or two. Like it as not, Iraq and Afghanistan are teaching the world that it's possible to survive against a modern army - but not by facing it head on. As always - find the weak spot and push...
cow farts?
It was, is, and always will be infantry. Not the dumb guy in front of you out in the open. The other guy you didn't see who threw the anti-tank grenade.
While a troop of super technological super stealthy tanks yields a great tactical advantage, this advantage is absolutely neutralized when your enemy can manufacture 50 not-so-good-but-good-enough-to-kill-you tanks to your one. All you need is defense in depth and eventually the numbers work in your favor. The US always seeks out an expensive technological approach to try to solve problems. While this can work sometimes, it sometimes results in hundred million dollar state-of-the-art planes that can't fly.
Hah, I have one that goes forward a whole day every 24 hours.
Also chicks dig geometry. I get lots and lots of chicks... I think.
I think that has a lot more to do with you pouring bread-crumbs all over yourself than geometry.
Nah, Hollywood is just not interested in having their boys - sorry, the FBI- do something about this. There's no movies involved.
So would pilots be encouraged to make really really really hard landings in order to create more energy for the departing aircraft? And who would clean up the mess?
Yes especially in Manhattan, it should be 1300 one bedroom studio apartments.
Or have the passengers push the trains to the next station.
IANAElectrician, but if you're storing the power locally couldn't you isolate sections of the track from each other and the grid in general and have an "acceleration" track to avoid what you describe? The connection with the rest of the rail could be broken when a train is about to leave, and the flywheel + grid is fed into a predetermined length of isolated track. The train accelerates with power from the flywheel (plus some grid) and crosses onto the main track via inertia but since it's at speed already the current draw is not that much so there shouldn't be a huge change when the train switches to the main track. Likewise the decelerating train leaves the main track and pumps energy back into the flywheel system only, not the whole network.
Has anybody tried just building the stations on hills?
Yah lots of hills in downtown Manhattan. You could just knock some of those buildings down land is cheap over there I hear. Didn't they like buy the whole island for $24 or something? Or you could dig the tunnels a little deeper because it's just dirt, right? And there's no ground-water from the Hudson river to worry about when you blast your way deep enough....
Electric motors draw maximum amps at the very beginning just before they start turning. After that the draw is significantly less because resistance increases. You know, V=IR rewritten as I = V/R. The voltage is fixed, the resistance is close to zero when the motor is not turning so the amps go sky high. But only for an instant. As soon as the motor starts turning resistance picks up due to electromagnetic effects and the current draw falls. This is why you'll burn out a motor switching it on and off too quickly. You're shooting tremendous amounts of current through a non-turning motor. All that huge amount of current heats up the coils until something melts. However the 10,000 amp figure is peak, not continuous for 30 seconds. Therefore it's not fair to use that figure for calculations over a 30 second acceleration period. The amps drawn would form a curve, and for that you'd need something a little more complex than y = mx+c to figure it out, ie knowing the exact curve for those engine types/trains and some calculus.
This reminds me of the late 70's and the Cola/Burger wars. I guess a lot of it has to do with the current economic climate and declining(?) revenue, just like back in the Carter days.
The first alien ship that passes by us asks if any one wants a one way ride out to see these sights close up...I'm in.
No - because you would not go so far as to "reduce" us to insects, the insect-like aliens will just sacrifice you and place you on the giant fungal heap and you never will see those sights. I, for one, welcome our insect overlords.
One click detonation by the range officer.
I believe this is the current rationale at the Fed, too.
accepted standards of morality
The Romans already knew that there really was no point arguing about subjective things. Yet here we are 2000 years later doing the same damned thing.
I agree. Someone in the creativity department forgot to take the time to actually look at how bathrooms are designed. No one is going to stand in front of the bathroom sink for an hour (after all, we apparently spend "an hour a day in the bathroom" according to TFA) to read the news. Much more convenient to bring a portable computing device with you if you're that desperate for onthrone connectivity.
Yeah because an animal that lives 6-10 years will have exactly the same chance of getting cancer than one that lives 70+ years. /sarcasm
Sucks to be the guy that's back and forth across the border every day... how much radiation is he going to get per year again?
I see you're not a gamer. I've played around with a few flavors of linux, but I'm not going to give up my games for it. And yes I've tried wine, cedega, etc - give me a break. Direct X "just works", every time. I have a dual boot box and I rarely boot into linux. Just to do online banking really.