Yup, and for larger corporate purchasers you get whatever you want pre-installed. Not just Win7, but your own corporate image of Win7 pre-configured with all the management tools, etc, and absolutely no shovelware. These are companies that could have Win8 for "free" if they wanted it, but they were sure to negotiate the rights to get the older versions where they want them. You can get XP on a new PC if you have the clout to ask for it.
I doubt that most people buying a new PC are going to get an i7. Sure, it is MUCH faster in terms of CPU-bound activities, but the fact is that most people don't do CPU-bound activities much. Maybe you can install OpenOffice faster, but how much faster is it at running Openoffice? You only install it once.
I personally appreciate the benefit and I upgrade more often. However, I'm not a typical user by any means.
The typical user would get far more out of sticking an SSD in their old P4 than spending the SAME amount of money on a newer CPU.
I think it is debatable, but what they didn't do is put iOS on their laptops/desktops.
They started out new with a new paradigm on a new device with new applications. There was no compatibility, for the most part.
I think MS's big mistake is that they're pretending like they're starting from scratch with a platform whose main selling point for the last 20 years is that it STILL supports even pre-win32 APIs and have 10-year support commitments. Apple doesn't even offer that level of backwards compatibility and yet they're still being more careful with changing OSX. Sure, OSX is getting a bit tabletized, but they're taking their time.
Apple is selling their products on their own merits, and integrating them as they go along. MS seems to be trying to push people to their own tablets by making changes to their desktop product, and I think that is going to backfire in a big way.
Try playing a video game that used a delay loop instead of checking the timer chip (or calibrating a loop to the timer chip).
As others have pointed out ISA cards also were sometimes problematic. The original PC spec never took into account that CPU clock speeds would increase. 4.77MHz ought to be enough for anybody.
I am a bit surprised to find it on a Pentium though - they were being phased out even in the 486 days.
The value of a currency is in its practical utility, which right now is limited for Bitcoin. That means that it doesn't have any of those stabilizing factors you mentioned. I agree - that makes it volatile.
However, what I was replying to was that bitcoin was somehow special because you couldn't really trade every bitcoin into dollars at the advertised rate. That is true of every currency - if everybody with a Euro tried to trade it into dollars they couldn't get the advertised rate.
What makes Euros and dollars stable is that they're exchangable against billions of different commodities and services offered by millions of vendors. If the gas station down the street refused to take dollars I'd just go to the next gas station down the street, or worst case I'd go to the grocery store and buy milk and barter it for gas. Dollars are stable because for their value to change quickly EVERYBODY has to change all their prices. Bitcoin isn't as stable because few people trade it and only on a few exchanges and few products are sold for bitcoins.
The only thing that really makes dollars or Euros valuable is that they're commonly used.
There isn't any reason Bitcoins couldn't be a stable currency. They just aren't right now.
On your point (1), it's pretty clear that Manning/Wikileaks loses on that count. He didn't filter the info, he did a massive info dump to the public that included operationally-sensitive details of ongoing military/CIA operatives and operations.
I'm certainly open to citations (that point to specific details that were leaked which actually provided military aid to the enemy), but most of what was dumped was merely embarrassing, and there was effort made to redact materials that were more sensitive.
I'm not aware of any publicly-released data which most people would consider operationally sensitive. Again, I'm open to examples, but the mere fact that they were classified does not mean that their release aided the enemy.
I'm not sure if Cat III requires an INS with a suitable level of performance. That and a radar altimiter is about the only thing that I think would defeat this attack. Of course, you can't just "recalibrate" the ILS to pull it off - you need to move it physically (either moving the original, or disabling it and setting up a new transmitter).
A radar altimeter alone would not really prevent this. The altimeter would tell you that you're 100 feet up, and you'd look down and see clouds, and have no idea that the runway is nowhere nearby.
Now, in a real attack of this type the crash wouldn't be that bad as long as there wasn't any protruding terrain (towers, buildings, steep hills, etc). The aircraft would still flare for landing as it approached the ground, so it would be making a controlled landing on something other than a runway. If it were level grass there would be few fatalities.
If CatIII requires INS/RNAV/etc and the aircraft actually uses it during approach then the crew would be aware of the discrepancy. These systems are not really adequate to actually land a plane with zero visibility (not reliably accurate to within a few feet), but they'll certainly tell you if the ILS isn't anywhere near the runway. What I don't know is if the autopilot or crew on a CatIII aircraft is required to compare the two. From a controls standpoint they just tune the ILS on the receiver and hit the approach mode on the panel just as you would in a Cessna - but I have no idea what cross-checks are implemented under the hood or by the crew. I do know that RNAV in general includes internal accuracy checks and redundancy so that it isn't used if it is not reliable, but I don't know if these apply to an ILS approach.
Might be worth noting that DHT does require UDP to communicate (no reason it should need to - it just was built that way). If your DHT-enabled client isn't on a network that delivers UDP then you're limited to trackers (which can use TCP).
UDP is difficult to deliver over networks that try to guarantee anonymity, which is something that people who use a site like The Pirate Bay would care about. The fact that most torrent clients leak data doesn't help, though it is solvable by ensuring your torrent client doesn't have access to any data to leak in the first place.
Yup, FIOS is notorious about this stuff. The installers are basically under the gun to install their shovelware on your PCs when deploying the service - they really don't want to take no for an answer. When having it installed I used my work laptop as the PC the service was intended for and informed the installer that my employer has a policy against non-standard software, which seemed to get around this.
Ostensibly they want local software for troubleshooting and so that you don't have a crazy MTU setting or something that will degrade your service. However, they will go ahead and put 14 more icons on your desktop for their partners, bookmarks in your browser, and reconfigure who knows what to point to their shovelware.
What these investors do not understand is that they cannot ALL get that price if they were to sell.
While true, that is hardly something limited to bitcoins. What would happen if everybody with an FDIC-insured bank account tried to withdraw their funds? What would happen if everybody with a US Dollar tried to convert it to a Euro?
No currency can support an infinite one-direction trade volume.
Now, I will grant you that you can convert a LOT more US Dollars to Euros than Bitcoins before you start affecting the price.
All currencies are ultimately virtual. Their worth is in their practical utility, which of course for Bitcoin is also limited at the moment.
Yup, and I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to transmit on the tower frequency from the nearest approach/center ATC. Those are usually in office buildings miles from airports.
Every one of those aircraft would have had an alternate designated which was far enough away as to not be likely to be closed, and they would have fuel to reach that alternate. When their primary airport closed and stopped responding they wouldn't have just sat around circling until they ran out of fuel - especially as they exceeded their planned hold time.
Pilots don't just guess how much fuel they need. They designate fuel for taxi, their planned route, to reach their alternate, planned hold time, and then a reserve on top of that. Pilots constantly check consumption against their plan, and when something doesn't add up they divert before they're anywhere near using up their reserves. If you have 30 minutes of hold fuel and you're holding for more than 30 minutes you divert, declare an emergency, or whatever. You don't just wait until you're gliding it in.
Well, they could do it for a Cat III ILS. For a Cat III ILS the decision height is zero - you can use it even if you can't see the ground at all. Considering the weather that would have been the only way to land the plane in any case - they didn't see the ground until it was too late to abort.
For less than Cat III the aircraft would have aborted when they failed to see the runway at the decision height. However, that would have likely meant aborting the landing even on a proper approach - any aircraft without Cat III wouldn't be just hanging around in that weather waiting for a clearance though.
Now, the hack that would work perfectly fine would be to put the ILS right in the path of a tall building. If the building were more than 200 feet tall the plane would crash into it before reaching the decision height.
If you want to make disclosure of classified information illegal, fine. Make it illegal, and assign to it an appropriate penalty. Then when somebody does it, charge them with that crime.
The problem here is that the charge is aiding the enemy, and the argument is that the enemy obtained the classified info and thus it aided them. I'm not sure that really should be allowed to stick. The problem with this is that it forces you to basically assign the same punishment to accidentally leaving your briefcase with some HR info on the bus and sneaking into the command tent, taking photos of the next day's plans, and transmitting them to enemy HQ.
When people commit a crime they should be charged with the crime they actually committed. I'm not suggesting that leaking classified info should be legal. However, the general trend of piling as many charges on as possible is bad for justice. There is a reason that we don't put people in prison for life for jaywalking or speeding.
If you're going to charge somebody with aiding the enemy you should have to show that: 1. The aid would have actually had some significant benefit to the enemy. We're not talking about exposing scandals that lose hearts and minds - I'm talking about improving their ability to achieve military objectives in military operations. So, pictures of tortured prisoners don't count, but plans leaked to an enemy agent or sabotage coordinated with an enemy attack counts just fine. I'm not sure I'd even include sabotage in general in this unless the intent was actually to aid the enemy.
2. There was intent to aid the enemy - it wasn't just accidental or incidental (unless it was just so obvious that the aid would have resulted that it could be considered criminal negligence).
Otherwise, just charge them with mishandling classified material.
Hmm, the cablecard I'm using with MythTV disagrees. Just one more reason not to subscribe to premium channels.
However, you're right - for OTA broadcasts the FCC apparently dropped the requirement in 2011 (though Congress could add it back at any time - it is basically in the standard already).
Tend to agree - if we're REALLY talking about HSR.
You need to get rid of all the stops though. I want a system where I catch a moderate-speed commuter train for 25 miles to the nearest city center, and then get on some 200mph train that makes 15 stops from Florida to Maine and covers the distance in 10 hours. Sure, you wouldn't actually ride it for the whole length (well, unless it were much cheaper than flying), but if you could go from Baltimore to Boston in 2.5 hours that would definitely sell (with stops in Philadelphia, NYC, and maybe someplace like Providence).
What kills HSR is when the thing ends up providing semi-local service, or it travels at 60mph. Have separate lines that provide actual local service for getting to the main transportation hubs.
The only OTA TV which is allowed to be paid is satellite - the TV broadcast bands are free-only. Oh, they use HDCP to make Hollywood happy, but any TV vendor is allowed to get a key to decrypt that as long as they abide by the copy flag (which doesn't apply to just displaying TV anyway), and they don't make the raw stream available in the clear to external devices.
That's the license for the broadcast TV bands in the US - nobody is forced to run a TV station and collect gazillions in ad money.
In Professor McMahon's perfect world, Google would pay extra salary to each of their employees, who would be taxed on that as income, and they would then use that money to buy food, paying sales tax. By giving people food instead of money Google is skipping both taxes.
I think the bigger lesson has nothing to do with taxes. MBAs today are obsessed with spreadsheets and put little value in the intangible. To an MBA $10 in the paycheck and a $10 steak lunch are the exact same thing. If anything the $10 in the paycheck has a higher value since if the employee isn't hungry they can't really run out and sell their steak to some guy on the street.
The problem is that an employee doesn't see it that way. They may place a value higher than $10 on that free meal, and the implied acceptance of a time when everybody can come together to sit down and eat together.
In many cases companies fail to really get the most value out of their workforce because they basically make their employees feel like numbers on a spreadsheet, and they underperform as a result. We pay executives far more than the military pays generals, but for the most part the generals understand what motivates their troops, which is why wars rarely are fought by mercenaries.
"And I have to pay taxes to support free meals for those Google employees."
I don't think this guy knows what he's talking about....
I think he's arguing about the taxes he wouldn't have to pay if the Google employees paid the correct amount of taxes. Google can save on salaries by providing perks instead. If they didn't offer free food arguably they'd have to offer more money, which would be taxed.
It is a bit of a roundabout argument, granted. In any case, it seems like these meals should be taxable - benefits to employees usually are taxable unless they are covered by some kind of exception. If you get to drive the company car for personal use that is taxable, and I don't see how this is any different.
Well, I can't say I'm doing any better, except I have to pay for all the food I overeat. If the food were free maybe I'd splurge for a better gym membership.:)
#1 isn't about being thin, but about being nowhere near the chaff from the missile's perspective.
Imagine the missile is coming from due north. You can run North, South, or E/W. If you run North then the missile seeker will likely pick you instead of the chaff since it will encounter you first - not good. If you run South then the missile will definitely encounter the chaff first, but since the chaff won't detonate it the missile will pass through and go back into search mode, and now you're still in front of it.
Instead you pick E/W (if the missile isn't headed directly for you already you'd escape in whichever option takes you away from its path). The missile is travelling in a line, and the fastest way to get away from that line is to travel away in a tangential course (well, technically the angle is slightly off the tangent away from the missile, but your relative velocities are so different that it is basically a round-off).
I do agree that aspect will increase your radar signature. I'm honestly not sure where the trade-off falls in the case of a ship. In the case of an aircraft you're definitely best off keeping the missile's course tangential to your own, because compared to the ground the doppler shift of an aircraft is VERY large. Plus, a tangential course forces the missile to continuously accelerate which drains its speed (it does not generate power continuously like a jet), but that is unlikely to matter for a ship.
Doppler shift is quite important when detecting aircraft. People talk about stealth aircraft having the radar cross-section of an insect, but that isn't nearly as impressive as it sounds, since the radar can just filter out returns from all the insects that aren't flying at 200 knots, assuming the aircraft is travelling towards/away-from the radar. When the aircraft is travelling tangentially to the radar there is no doppler shift and now the radar has to deal with noise from whatever is behind the aircraft (like the ground in the case of a missile looking down). An anti-ship missile would have the same problem, though obviously they've solved it one way or another (the size and low speed of a ship likely helps with that).
Sure, but there is a big difference between a big tank of fuel that can only burn on the surface (burning fuel does require oxygen), and a big room full of high explosive which does not require oxygen to burn.
If you set off an explosive the entire block of explosive will be completely combusted in less time than it takes the sound of whatever set it off to travel through the block. That's actually the definition of detonation.
The only way to get fuel to burn like that is to put it in a fuel air explosive (and that is quite impressive). And if you're talking about a nuclear vessel, well, about the only thing blowing up a reactor will do is make a big mess.
First, I think you need to use a bit more care with your units. Watts are not a unit of energy, and watts/second is not a unit of power.
I have no doubt that supercapacitors or capacitors would be used to buffer a directed energy weapon, but their total capacity probably wouldn't be that high - probably only enough energy for a few shots.
Think about how they'll be used. For point defense a laser might have to deal with a dozen missiles at once. For area defense a laser would have to deal with a few hundred missiles at once. That means either having a capacitor that stores power for that many shots (likely not practical to design, and highly unsafe), or being able to supply ship power for that many shots over a period of a minute or so with a capacitor that can buffer a few shots. Most likely the laser will only fire so quickly just due to heat dissipation and the time to acquire targets (a shot or two per second would be much higher than what missiles achieve already). The purpose of the capacitor isn't so that the bank can slow-charge for a day and then expend all its power in a minute. The purpose of the capacitor is so that the demand on ships power is only a megawatt or two continuous and not spikes of a few exawatts for femptoseconds at a time with the rest of the time spent not drawing any power at all.
So, as long as these lasers are just novelties they might be powered by modest supercapacitors. However, if they are going to be a workhorse then the ships power supply will likely be scaled to run them continuously. When you have 350 missiles incoming you don't want to find out that you're out of juice.
Compared to moving a ship I suspect these lasers won't use THAT much power. I think the bigger problem for sustained firing will be cooling (obviously you have a huge heat sink under the deck, but getting megawatts of heat down there isn't trivial especially when the heat is coming from things like optics that don't conduct it so well and which are sensitive to temperature changes). Just building the lasers themselves is obviously a huge problem as well - supplying power is likely to be fairly simple in comparison.
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Yup, and for larger corporate purchasers you get whatever you want pre-installed. Not just Win7, but your own corporate image of Win7 pre-configured with all the management tools, etc, and absolutely no shovelware. These are companies that could have Win8 for "free" if they wanted it, but they were sure to negotiate the rights to get the older versions where they want them. You can get XP on a new PC if you have the clout to ask for it.
I doubt that most people buying a new PC are going to get an i7. Sure, it is MUCH faster in terms of CPU-bound activities, but the fact is that most people don't do CPU-bound activities much. Maybe you can install OpenOffice faster, but how much faster is it at running Openoffice? You only install it once.
I personally appreciate the benefit and I upgrade more often. However, I'm not a typical user by any means.
The typical user would get far more out of sticking an SSD in their old P4 than spending the SAME amount of money on a newer CPU.
I think it is debatable, but what they didn't do is put iOS on their laptops/desktops.
They started out new with a new paradigm on a new device with new applications. There was no compatibility, for the most part.
I think MS's big mistake is that they're pretending like they're starting from scratch with a platform whose main selling point for the last 20 years is that it STILL supports even pre-win32 APIs and have 10-year support commitments. Apple doesn't even offer that level of backwards compatibility and yet they're still being more careful with changing OSX. Sure, OSX is getting a bit tabletized, but they're taking their time.
Apple is selling their products on their own merits, and integrating them as they go along. MS seems to be trying to push people to their own tablets by making changes to their desktop product, and I think that is going to backfire in a big way.
Benefits of not having multiple 15k drives in a laptop? You left out not having the laptop leap out of your hands anytime you tilt it.
Try playing a video game that used a delay loop instead of checking the timer chip (or calibrating a loop to the timer chip).
As others have pointed out ISA cards also were sometimes problematic. The original PC spec never took into account that CPU clock speeds would increase. 4.77MHz ought to be enough for anybody.
I am a bit surprised to find it on a Pentium though - they were being phased out even in the 486 days.
You really didn't say anything I didn't say.
The value of a currency is in its practical utility, which right now is limited for Bitcoin. That means that it doesn't have any of those stabilizing factors you mentioned. I agree - that makes it volatile.
However, what I was replying to was that bitcoin was somehow special because you couldn't really trade every bitcoin into dollars at the advertised rate. That is true of every currency - if everybody with a Euro tried to trade it into dollars they couldn't get the advertised rate.
What makes Euros and dollars stable is that they're exchangable against billions of different commodities and services offered by millions of vendors. If the gas station down the street refused to take dollars I'd just go to the next gas station down the street, or worst case I'd go to the grocery store and buy milk and barter it for gas. Dollars are stable because for their value to change quickly EVERYBODY has to change all their prices. Bitcoin isn't as stable because few people trade it and only on a few exchanges and few products are sold for bitcoins.
The only thing that really makes dollars or Euros valuable is that they're commonly used.
There isn't any reason Bitcoins couldn't be a stable currency. They just aren't right now.
On your point (1), it's pretty clear that Manning/Wikileaks loses on that count. He didn't filter the info, he did a massive info dump to the public that included operationally-sensitive details of ongoing military/CIA operatives and operations.
I'm certainly open to citations (that point to specific details that were leaked which actually provided military aid to the enemy), but most of what was dumped was merely embarrassing, and there was effort made to redact materials that were more sensitive.
I'm not aware of any publicly-released data which most people would consider operationally sensitive. Again, I'm open to examples, but the mere fact that they were classified does not mean that their release aided the enemy.
I'm not sure if Cat III requires an INS with a suitable level of performance. That and a radar altimiter is about the only thing that I think would defeat this attack. Of course, you can't just "recalibrate" the ILS to pull it off - you need to move it physically (either moving the original, or disabling it and setting up a new transmitter).
A radar altimeter alone would not really prevent this. The altimeter would tell you that you're 100 feet up, and you'd look down and see clouds, and have no idea that the runway is nowhere nearby.
Now, in a real attack of this type the crash wouldn't be that bad as long as there wasn't any protruding terrain (towers, buildings, steep hills, etc). The aircraft would still flare for landing as it approached the ground, so it would be making a controlled landing on something other than a runway. If it were level grass there would be few fatalities.
If CatIII requires INS/RNAV/etc and the aircraft actually uses it during approach then the crew would be aware of the discrepancy. These systems are not really adequate to actually land a plane with zero visibility (not reliably accurate to within a few feet), but they'll certainly tell you if the ILS isn't anywhere near the runway. What I don't know is if the autopilot or crew on a CatIII aircraft is required to compare the two. From a controls standpoint they just tune the ILS on the receiver and hit the approach mode on the panel just as you would in a Cessna - but I have no idea what cross-checks are implemented under the hood or by the crew. I do know that RNAV in general includes internal accuracy checks and redundancy so that it isn't used if it is not reliable, but I don't know if these apply to an ILS approach.
Might be worth noting that DHT does require UDP to communicate (no reason it should need to - it just was built that way). If your DHT-enabled client isn't on a network that delivers UDP then you're limited to trackers (which can use TCP).
UDP is difficult to deliver over networks that try to guarantee anonymity, which is something that people who use a site like The Pirate Bay would care about. The fact that most torrent clients leak data doesn't help, though it is solvable by ensuring your torrent client doesn't have access to any data to leak in the first place.
Yup, FIOS is notorious about this stuff. The installers are basically under the gun to install their shovelware on your PCs when deploying the service - they really don't want to take no for an answer. When having it installed I used my work laptop as the PC the service was intended for and informed the installer that my employer has a policy against non-standard software, which seemed to get around this.
Ostensibly they want local software for troubleshooting and so that you don't have a crazy MTU setting or something that will degrade your service. However, they will go ahead and put 14 more icons on your desktop for their partners, bookmarks in your browser, and reconfigure who knows what to point to their shovelware.
What these investors do not understand is that they cannot ALL get that price if they were to sell.
While true, that is hardly something limited to bitcoins. What would happen if everybody with an FDIC-insured bank account tried to withdraw their funds? What would happen if everybody with a US Dollar tried to convert it to a Euro?
No currency can support an infinite one-direction trade volume.
Now, I will grant you that you can convert a LOT more US Dollars to Euros than Bitcoins before you start affecting the price.
All currencies are ultimately virtual. Their worth is in their practical utility, which of course for Bitcoin is also limited at the moment.
Yup, and I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to transmit on the tower frequency from the nearest approach/center ATC. Those are usually in office buildings miles from airports.
Every one of those aircraft would have had an alternate designated which was far enough away as to not be likely to be closed, and they would have fuel to reach that alternate. When their primary airport closed and stopped responding they wouldn't have just sat around circling until they ran out of fuel - especially as they exceeded their planned hold time.
Pilots don't just guess how much fuel they need. They designate fuel for taxi, their planned route, to reach their alternate, planned hold time, and then a reserve on top of that. Pilots constantly check consumption against their plan, and when something doesn't add up they divert before they're anywhere near using up their reserves. If you have 30 minutes of hold fuel and you're holding for more than 30 minutes you divert, declare an emergency, or whatever. You don't just wait until you're gliding it in.
Well, they could do it for a Cat III ILS. For a Cat III ILS the decision height is zero - you can use it even if you can't see the ground at all. Considering the weather that would have been the only way to land the plane in any case - they didn't see the ground until it was too late to abort.
For less than Cat III the aircraft would have aborted when they failed to see the runway at the decision height. However, that would have likely meant aborting the landing even on a proper approach - any aircraft without Cat III wouldn't be just hanging around in that weather waiting for a clearance though.
Now, the hack that would work perfectly fine would be to put the ILS right in the path of a tall building. If the building were more than 200 feet tall the plane would crash into it before reaching the decision height.
Here is my problem with this kind of reasoning.
If you want to make disclosure of classified information illegal, fine. Make it illegal, and assign to it an appropriate penalty. Then when somebody does it, charge them with that crime.
The problem here is that the charge is aiding the enemy, and the argument is that the enemy obtained the classified info and thus it aided them. I'm not sure that really should be allowed to stick. The problem with this is that it forces you to basically assign the same punishment to accidentally leaving your briefcase with some HR info on the bus and sneaking into the command tent, taking photos of the next day's plans, and transmitting them to enemy HQ.
When people commit a crime they should be charged with the crime they actually committed. I'm not suggesting that leaking classified info should be legal. However, the general trend of piling as many charges on as possible is bad for justice. There is a reason that we don't put people in prison for life for jaywalking or speeding.
If you're going to charge somebody with aiding the enemy you should have to show that:
1. The aid would have actually had some significant benefit to the enemy. We're not talking about exposing scandals that lose hearts and minds - I'm talking about improving their ability to achieve military objectives in military operations. So, pictures of tortured prisoners don't count, but plans leaked to an enemy agent or sabotage coordinated with an enemy attack counts just fine. I'm not sure I'd even include sabotage in general in this unless the intent was actually to aid the enemy.
2. There was intent to aid the enemy - it wasn't just accidental or incidental (unless it was just so obvious that the aid would have resulted that it could be considered criminal negligence).
Otherwise, just charge them with mishandling classified material.
Hmm, the cablecard I'm using with MythTV disagrees. Just one more reason not to subscribe to premium channels.
However, you're right - for OTA broadcasts the FCC apparently dropped the requirement in 2011 (though Congress could add it back at any time - it is basically in the standard already).
Tend to agree - if we're REALLY talking about HSR.
You need to get rid of all the stops though. I want a system where I catch a moderate-speed commuter train for 25 miles to the nearest city center, and then get on some 200mph train that makes 15 stops from Florida to Maine and covers the distance in 10 hours. Sure, you wouldn't actually ride it for the whole length (well, unless it were much cheaper than flying), but if you could go from Baltimore to Boston in 2.5 hours that would definitely sell (with stops in Philadelphia, NYC, and maybe someplace like Providence).
What kills HSR is when the thing ends up providing semi-local service, or it travels at 60mph. Have separate lines that provide actual local service for getting to the main transportation hubs.
The only OTA TV which is allowed to be paid is satellite - the TV broadcast bands are free-only. Oh, they use HDCP to make Hollywood happy, but any TV vendor is allowed to get a key to decrypt that as long as they abide by the copy flag (which doesn't apply to just displaying TV anyway), and they don't make the raw stream available in the clear to external devices.
That's the license for the broadcast TV bands in the US - nobody is forced to run a TV station and collect gazillions in ad money.
That is a VERY good point. Such an operation might even qualify as a 501c3. :)
(Not that it matters - the expense is deductible to Google either way, and I doubt many will sign up to donate to the Google employee food fund.)
How much do you want to bet that they just pocketed the difference?
Small businesses often fail to remit sales taxes to the state - but they still collect it at the register.
In Professor McMahon's perfect world, Google would pay extra salary to each of their employees, who would be taxed on that as income, and they would then use that money to buy food, paying sales tax. By giving people food instead of money Google is skipping both taxes.
I think the bigger lesson has nothing to do with taxes. MBAs today are obsessed with spreadsheets and put little value in the intangible. To an MBA $10 in the paycheck and a $10 steak lunch are the exact same thing. If anything the $10 in the paycheck has a higher value since if the employee isn't hungry they can't really run out and sell their steak to some guy on the street.
The problem is that an employee doesn't see it that way. They may place a value higher than $10 on that free meal, and the implied acceptance of a time when everybody can come together to sit down and eat together.
In many cases companies fail to really get the most value out of their workforce because they basically make their employees feel like numbers on a spreadsheet, and they underperform as a result. We pay executives far more than the military pays generals, but for the most part the generals understand what motivates their troops, which is why wars rarely are fought by mercenaries.
WTF?!?
I don't think this guy knows what he's talking about ....
I think he's arguing about the taxes he wouldn't have to pay if the Google employees paid the correct amount of taxes. Google can save on salaries by providing perks instead. If they didn't offer free food arguably they'd have to offer more money, which would be taxed.
It is a bit of a roundabout argument, granted. In any case, it seems like these meals should be taxable - benefits to employees usually are taxable unless they are covered by some kind of exception. If you get to drive the company car for personal use that is taxable, and I don't see how this is any different.
Well, I can't say I'm doing any better, except I have to pay for all the food I overeat. If the food were free maybe I'd splurge for a better gym membership. :)
#1 isn't about being thin, but about being nowhere near the chaff from the missile's perspective.
Imagine the missile is coming from due north. You can run North, South, or E/W. If you run North then the missile seeker will likely pick you instead of the chaff since it will encounter you first - not good. If you run South then the missile will definitely encounter the chaff first, but since the chaff won't detonate it the missile will pass through and go back into search mode, and now you're still in front of it.
Instead you pick E/W (if the missile isn't headed directly for you already you'd escape in whichever option takes you away from its path). The missile is travelling in a line, and the fastest way to get away from that line is to travel away in a tangential course (well, technically the angle is slightly off the tangent away from the missile, but your relative velocities are so different that it is basically a round-off).
I do agree that aspect will increase your radar signature. I'm honestly not sure where the trade-off falls in the case of a ship. In the case of an aircraft you're definitely best off keeping the missile's course tangential to your own, because compared to the ground the doppler shift of an aircraft is VERY large. Plus, a tangential course forces the missile to continuously accelerate which drains its speed (it does not generate power continuously like a jet), but that is unlikely to matter for a ship.
Doppler shift is quite important when detecting aircraft. People talk about stealth aircraft having the radar cross-section of an insect, but that isn't nearly as impressive as it sounds, since the radar can just filter out returns from all the insects that aren't flying at 200 knots, assuming the aircraft is travelling towards/away-from the radar. When the aircraft is travelling tangentially to the radar there is no doppler shift and now the radar has to deal with noise from whatever is behind the aircraft (like the ground in the case of a missile looking down). An anti-ship missile would have the same problem, though obviously they've solved it one way or another (the size and low speed of a ship likely helps with that).
Sure, but there is a big difference between a big tank of fuel that can only burn on the surface (burning fuel does require oxygen), and a big room full of high explosive which does not require oxygen to burn.
If you set off an explosive the entire block of explosive will be completely combusted in less time than it takes the sound of whatever set it off to travel through the block. That's actually the definition of detonation.
The only way to get fuel to burn like that is to put it in a fuel air explosive (and that is quite impressive). And if you're talking about a nuclear vessel, well, about the only thing blowing up a reactor will do is make a big mess.
First, I think you need to use a bit more care with your units. Watts are not a unit of energy, and watts/second is not a unit of power.
I have no doubt that supercapacitors or capacitors would be used to buffer a directed energy weapon, but their total capacity probably wouldn't be that high - probably only enough energy for a few shots.
Think about how they'll be used. For point defense a laser might have to deal with a dozen missiles at once. For area defense a laser would have to deal with a few hundred missiles at once. That means either having a capacitor that stores power for that many shots (likely not practical to design, and highly unsafe), or being able to supply ship power for that many shots over a period of a minute or so with a capacitor that can buffer a few shots. Most likely the laser will only fire so quickly just due to heat dissipation and the time to acquire targets (a shot or two per second would be much higher than what missiles achieve already). The purpose of the capacitor isn't so that the bank can slow-charge for a day and then expend all its power in a minute. The purpose of the capacitor is so that the demand on ships power is only a megawatt or two continuous and not spikes of a few exawatts for femptoseconds at a time with the rest of the time spent not drawing any power at all.
So, as long as these lasers are just novelties they might be powered by modest supercapacitors. However, if they are going to be a workhorse then the ships power supply will likely be scaled to run them continuously. When you have 350 missiles incoming you don't want to find out that you're out of juice.
Compared to moving a ship I suspect these lasers won't use THAT much power. I think the bigger problem for sustained firing will be cooling (obviously you have a huge heat sink under the deck, but getting megawatts of heat down there isn't trivial especially when the heat is coming from things like optics that don't conduct it so well and which are sensitive to temperature changes). Just building the lasers themselves is obviously a huge problem as well - supplying power is likely to be fairly simple in comparison.