Unlikely. This type of job has been done in the past, IIRC near the Murmansk naval base: the Soviet Navy had its own private communications cable across the bay, and the US managed to splice it and install recorders. The recordings were then swapped a few times/year for new media.
But cables like FLAG have a capacity on the order of 10 Gb/s. You'd have to sink a whole datacenter near the splice to process and store that much data.
No, let's say thank "god" no one was ever killed on behalf of religious skepticism, or agnosticism, or whatever you call it.
But people were (and are) killed on behalf of etc. In every communist country (you know, the ones that had 'atheism' as the state religion), people were put in jail/labor camp for refusing to renounce their religion. Thousands died for the crime of being a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist etc. Now you could argue that this is just a government jealous/afraid of any organized movement that could possibly jeopardize the state, or even that in these countries, a belief in the state is the official religion instead of atheism. But let's not pretend that people who claim there is no god are incapable of persecuting those who don't agree with them.
True, but that ignores the economic reality, and a few more factors. 1. We're talking about (relatively) poor countries, so the budget for massively redundant infrastructure simply isn't there. 2. Cables across land are easy when the region you go through is politically stable. It's another matter when there's a war going on. For example, Egypt shares borders with Sudan, and a cable going West from Egypt would cross Algeria. 3. Cables across hundreds of km of undeveloped desert aren't cheap to install or maintain. It's much easier along existing infrastructure, but even then it's an expensive business. 4. Items 1 and 3 combined mean that you'll get a few high-capacity links instead of multiple smaller-capacity links. 5. The telecom tradition of 100% uptime is typical of first-world countries. In Africa, people tend to be more accepting of the occasional outage. See #1.
Also, how much redundancy is enough? Currently, Egypt has 3 major links (FLAG, SEA-ME-WE 3 and SEA-ME-WE 4) to Europe, and 3 (the same cables) to Asia. They're all separated, so a single incident would take out (ballpark) 1/6 of their bandwidth. Severing 3 cables in one week falls under 'shit happens', IMO.
You're right, hydrogen has a high energy density, you gain something like a factor of 3 which I didn't account for. Doesn't really change the outcome, though. Besides, my other estimates (amount of fuel per sortie and sorties/day) are on the low side. Those 7 tons of fuel are gone in an hour.
With such powerful power source as nuclear reactor is, why don't Navy use hydrogen-powered jets and just produce hydrogen for them from sea water, as needed? That would boost operational autonomy over the top.
Hydrogen is hard to store. You end up either with heavy high-pressure tanks, or with metal hydrides. Both take up much more volume than the equivalent amount of energy in oil-based fuel. It might be possible, but space and weight for carrier aircraft are always at a premium: making them all 50% larger to accomodate hydrogen tanks would halve the number of aircraft on the carrier, which would make the carrier only 30% as effective as it is now.
Also, you'd need a huge plant to keep up with demand. The A4W used in the Nimitz class can supply some 100 MW. Hydrogen contains 37 kWh/kg, let's say hydrolysis is 50% efficient so you need 74 kWh to make 1 kg. 100 MW will get you 1351 kg of hydrogen per hour. That's 31 tons per day.
The Nimitz carries about 11,000 metric tons of aviation fuel. Every aircraft takes off with 5-10 tons of fuel on board, you've got 85 aircraft, so you're looking at using (2 sorties *85*7 tons average) ~1200 tons of fuel per day. You need a reactor 40 times as large as the A4W to keep up with demand.
IMHO, its a bit pretentious to say that this, stuff is "common sense". The little endian nature of the gauge scale (not to mention that it is logarithmic so 19 gauge is 2x the diameter of 20 gauge), and the unclear nature of the warnings on the stuff is kinda useless. It would make far more sense to make the Amperage of all devices clearer (peak), and simply put "This cable can carrying X amps at Y temperature, and is unsafe for use at higher temperatures" on extension cables.
Using SI units would make things a whole lot easier. Over here, we specify wire gauges as the diameter (in mm^2). A nice, linear scale, not some silly non-intuitive inverse log. Also, extension cords are labeled with the maximum allowed power (in W), making it easy to calculate whether it's safe for the intended application (since every appliance also has a power rating on its label). Welcome to the 21st century.
Since this new hardware has no commercial value, there's no incentive in including it in new cellphones, so they'd have to become a legal requirement. Once this precedent has been set with radiation detectors, what's next? Chemical sensors to detect drug labs? GPS for even-more-automated speeding tickets? Continuous audio streaming from every cellphone microphone so the TLA agencies can run voice recognition and speech-to-text conversion, etc.?
Also, when will it become a crime not to have your Personal Surveillance Device with you?
But that's an entirely different trend. The UI of early CD players didn't lend themselves to the kind of mixing a DJ does. Fine cue/review control, scratching etc. were impossible, even pitch control took years to become commonly available. Modern hardware allows all this so DJs can move to the more convenient medium.
The only reason they do this, is that in some cities it will be cheaper than - buying land and building a data center on it OR - building a data center outside the city on cheap land and then having to pay for high-speed connectivity to the city
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Unlikely.
This type of job has been done in the past, IIRC near the Murmansk naval base: the Soviet Navy had its own private communications cable across the bay, and the US managed to splice it and install recorders. The recordings were then swapped a few times/year for new media.
But cables like FLAG have a capacity on the order of 10 Gb/s. You'd have to sink a whole datacenter near the splice to process and store that much data.
Here you go:
.
Come on, no mention of any mechanical calculator? No Babbage machines?
No, let's say thank "god" no one was ever killed on behalf of religious skepticism, or agnosticism, or whatever you call it.
But people were (and are) killed on behalf of etc. In every communist country (you know, the ones that had 'atheism' as the state religion), people were put in jail/labor camp for refusing to renounce their religion. Thousands died for the crime of being a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist etc.
Now you could argue that this is just a government jealous/afraid of any organized movement that could possibly jeopardize the state, or even that in these countries, a belief in the state is the official religion instead of atheism. But let's not pretend that people who claim there is no god are incapable of persecuting those who don't agree with them.
True, but that ignores the economic reality, and a few more factors.
1. We're talking about (relatively) poor countries, so the budget for massively redundant infrastructure simply isn't there.
2. Cables across land are easy when the region you go through is politically stable. It's another matter when there's a war going on. For example, Egypt shares borders with Sudan, and a cable going West from Egypt would cross Algeria.
3. Cables across hundreds of km of undeveloped desert aren't cheap to install or maintain. It's much easier along existing infrastructure, but even then it's an expensive business.
4. Items 1 and 3 combined mean that you'll get a few high-capacity links instead of multiple smaller-capacity links.
5. The telecom tradition of 100% uptime is typical of first-world countries. In Africa, people tend to be more accepting of the occasional outage. See #1.
Also, how much redundancy is enough? Currently, Egypt has 3 major links (FLAG, SEA-ME-WE 3 and SEA-ME-WE 4) to Europe, and 3 (the same cables) to Asia. They're all separated, so a single incident would take out (ballpark) 1/6 of their bandwidth. Severing 3 cables in one week falls under 'shit happens', IMO.
divers will find a backhoe sitting on the sea floor near where the cable was cut.
Show up with a team of people, unannounced, and use ignorance, surprise, and fear to their advantage.
In other words, nobody expects the BSA?
You're right, hydrogen has a high energy density, you gain something like a factor of 3 which I didn't account for. Doesn't really change the outcome, though. Besides, my other estimates (amount of fuel per sortie and sorties/day) are on the low side. Those 7 tons of fuel are gone in an hour.
Sorry, should have said 'cross-sectional area' instead of diameter. And the current capacity scales linearly with cross-sectional area.
They forgot one thing: the earthquake...
With such powerful power source as nuclear reactor is, why don't Navy use hydrogen-powered jets and just produce hydrogen for them from sea water, as needed? That would boost operational autonomy over the top.
Hydrogen is hard to store. You end up either with heavy high-pressure tanks, or with metal hydrides. Both take up much more volume than the equivalent amount of energy in oil-based fuel. It might be possible, but space and weight for carrier aircraft are always at a premium: making them all 50% larger to accomodate hydrogen tanks would halve the number of aircraft on the carrier, which would make the carrier only 30% as effective as it is now.
Also, you'd need a huge plant to keep up with demand.
The A4W used in the Nimitz class can supply some 100 MW.
Hydrogen contains 37 kWh/kg, let's say hydrolysis is 50% efficient so you need 74 kWh to make 1 kg. 100 MW will get you 1351 kg of hydrogen per hour. That's 31 tons per day.
The Nimitz carries about 11,000 metric tons of aviation fuel. Every aircraft takes off with 5-10 tons of fuel on board, you've got 85 aircraft, so you're looking at using (2 sorties *85*7 tons average) ~1200 tons of fuel per day. You need a reactor 40 times as large as the A4W to keep up with demand.
IMHO, its a bit pretentious to say that this, stuff is "common sense". The little endian nature of the gauge scale (not to mention that it is logarithmic so 19 gauge is 2x the diameter of 20 gauge), and the unclear nature of the warnings on the stuff is kinda useless. It would make far more sense to make the Amperage of all devices clearer (peak), and simply put "This cable can carrying X amps at Y temperature, and is unsafe for use at higher temperatures" on extension cables.
Using SI units would make things a whole lot easier. Over here, we specify wire gauges as the diameter (in mm^2). A nice, linear scale, not some silly non-intuitive inverse log. Also, extension cords are labeled with the maximum allowed power (in W), making it easy to calculate whether it's safe for the intended application (since every appliance also has a power rating on its label). Welcome to the 21st century.
does it run on Aqua Regia?
The Technic range is still going strong, with (still) a good mixture of custom elements and lots of generic bricks and beams.
Since this new hardware has no commercial value, there's no incentive in including it in new cellphones, so they'd have to become a legal requirement. Once this precedent has been set with radiation detectors, what's next? Chemical sensors to detect drug labs? GPS for even-more-automated speeding tickets? Continuous audio streaming from every cellphone microphone so the TLA agencies can run voice recognition and speech-to-text conversion, etc.?
Also, when will it become a crime not to have your Personal Surveillance Device with you?
They claim the detectors are very sensitive. Sensitive enough to go off, say, near a smoke alarm? You'd get millions of false positives.
I, for one, hate seeing common, general words be misused like that. It's a lower-than-low attention grab.
I prefer Calvin's perspective on art.
And give Google access to all my financial data? Over my dead body.
2^31 should be enough for anyone...
But that's an entirely different trend. The UI of early CD players didn't lend themselves to the kind of mixing a DJ does. Fine cue/review control, scratching etc. were impossible, even pitch control took years to become commonly available. Modern hardware allows all this so DJs can move to the more convenient medium.
Oblig. Klingon programming best practice
A paper on moving asteroid, with 10N of force!
Paper beats rock, then? We already knew that.
Must have been the Spanish Inquisition...
The only reason they do this, is that in some cities it will be cheaper than
- buying land and building a data center on it OR
- building a data center outside the city on cheap land and then having to pay for high-speed connectivity to the city