Wow ! This is quite a polarized view. Seen from the other side of the Atlantic, such attitude seem as extremist as the extremist you want to be expelled from 'your' society. I am not an history wonk, but I believe that at some point in time all nations and all religions were welcome in the USA ("Bring me those poor, tired, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free..."). I am sure, not to be too cynic, that it was a ploy to grow the 'european' population faster and 'occupy' the western and northern territories taken from the natives and in order to expand demographically and militarily the young nation ; but nevertheless many immigrants must have held that belief and transmitted that to their descendants. Well after Waco, TX and 9/11, I am sure the dialogue between religious and atheists must have been a little soured, and I would not think to have reacted differently. But take example on our European mass shooter: Anders Breivik was not acting upon religious imperatives but over cultural purity. Try to always keep in mind that the mainstream media only shows the extreme opinions, the rarely occuring events, the peculiar trends, the single narrow point-of-view, and that politicians (from either side) only react to those because they want to be in those media for their name to be remembered comes the election. If only people would pay attention to what politicians DO instead of what politicians SAY, well first of all we would put in jail the majority of the politicians who occupy the front page, then we would let the politicians who DO things be heard instead, and eventually we would elect the politicians who would defend your values based on past actions instead of having to decide blind folded between the least crooked of them all. Then we would have a political discourse able to address social issues, which of course the media would put on the front page under misleading or blatantly erroneous titles (why am I thinking of Slashdot right now ?) and which would try to play on misunderstandings and rejections from the people who would not have the time to read the piece or discard the whole thing ; the former (i.e. sensationalist journalists) would have to be fired or only be allowed to do obituaries, the latter (i.e. over-stressed people or shallow people) would have to get trained to put into perspective, to challenge any point-of-view, to question any certainty, to test any axioms, or to accept the impact the beliefs of others (corporations, political or religious groups) has upon ourselves ; my point is: you either think by yourself or you accept that others do the thinking for you, no knowledge is free.
The latest carrier based drones have airborne refueling capabilities just like the manned jets.
If you're talking about Northrop Grumman's X-47 UCAV, it is only developmental and has not yet flown off a carrier... But yes, drones having refueling capability, buddy refueling even more so, are going to set a new standard on mission duration.
But manned jets have to contend with pilot fatigue.
UCAV too in a sense : they are constantly monitored by one or two operators (sometimes even flight-rated pilots), who DO have to manage fatigue; the good thing is they are in a facility where crews can rotate without the aircraft having to provide accommodations for all those people. These aircrafts are unmanned in the sense that there is no man ON BOARD, but there is of course a man (or woman, one or more) in the loop. This is why they are sometimes called "remotely" piloted aircraft.
One of the latest tests off a carrier was a 55 hour non-stop single drone mission. There is not a pilot in the world capable of handling missions of that length. Even the existing manned B-2 bombers that launch missions from the mid-west to targets in the middle east are pushing the limits a pilot can handle.
Wikipedia states that a B-2 mission has lasted 50 hours with round-trip flight from Barksdale AFB to the Middle-East, but I cannot find any reference of it in the official U.S. Air Force website, which states that B-52s during Operation Desert Storm used to undertake missions of 35 hours. In both cases, these are bomber aircrafts which are designed for long duration missions : the B-2 has two pilots, is thoroughly automated, and of course has a toilet. Lockheed's U-2 Dragonlady pilots are not so lucky on their 9 hours mission (see http://www.blackbirds.net/u2/u-2mission.html) at 70k feet in their astronaut-like full pressure suit.
I am afraid you have not kept up with XMLHttpRequest and the whole scripting activities currently involved in developing a modern website. It is even said that website development is so complex nowadays[citation needed] that separate professional functions have to divide up the work: designers, programmers, testers, moderators and, of course, trolls.
I too long for the good ol' days of websites being displayed equally "beautifully" in NCSA's Mosaic or ISC's Lynx. STOP vomiting flashing text, animated gifs, flash ads and floating DIVs, DAMMIT!
They have a point, we should shut down the sun to protect us from all that harmful radiation. As a bonus Global Warming will no longer be an issue.
Mod this UP! We should also shut down the universe which emits so much of these damn radiations, and eventually 'live' in an absolute zero absolute maximum entropy state.
We have the "Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire" (Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety Institute) and the "Autorité de sûreté nucléaire" (Nuclear Safety Authority) which are the official organizations for the safety of the nuclear installations in France. They are supposedly independent from the industry and the government. Their credibility suffers from a precedent during the Chernobyl catastrophe when the Health ministry's central bureau of protection against ionizing radiation director, Pierre Pellerin, consistently and continuously said the radioactive cloud would not have any impact and no safety precautions should be taken, while all neighbor countries (even Spain and Great Britain which were further down the route of the cloud) had measured elevated radiation on produce. The CRIIRAD "Commission de recherche et d'information indépendantes sur la radioactivité" (Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity) is the most independant organization since it is not official and uses publicly available data and measures made by independently owned detectors.
About the intrusion by Greenpeace, I find their action disingenuous: the Genarmerie Nationale has now dedicated special groups to the protection of all nuclear plants since this summer, but this takes time to be put in place; other Greenpeace activists have tried to break into several other facilities but were arrested by the local law enforcement (or possibly the said special Gendearmerie groups); furthermore elected officials and experts conducted a live and surprise safety exercise not weeks ago to assess the measures put in place against floods and earthquakes (operation Opera during the night of December 1st).
The problem the Fukushima events showed evidently is that you do not have to make the nuclear reactor go critical and explode to cause a major radiological catastrophe: you just have to cut the power to the control room and safety system that prevents the reactor to sustain and limit its heating-cooling cycle.
Therefore protection against any intrusion or incident is paramount to the safety of the plant, therefore security should be airtight.
Parent post has it right: the Gendarmerie Nationale is in charge of the protection from intrusion into nuclear plants and other facilities and even NBC protection.
Too bad their website is such a cluttered mess built on what appears to be a default CMS template.
I fail to see how this would be detrimental to usability : I am completely comfortable with the layout of the website, if not a little overwhelmed by text and ads...
Not all websites must be Web 3.14 with CSS and AJAX spewing all over the place and a completely separate navigation and history paradigm from you web browser (I hate when I cannot see precisely each "page" I visited on the web, unless of course it is a "news" site inc. Slashdot or Facebook).
Keep it Simple, people ! I want to be able to disable Javascript and every other plugins in my browser and still be allowed to consume the web content, otherwise I won't bother and pick up a good book (THAT's good old nice usability)
The stratosphere is the layer of the atmosphere where temperature goes hotter the higher you go since the ozone gas releases heat when broken into monoatomic oxygen and diatomic oxygen by the ultraviolet rays of the Sun.
I suppose the parent estimated that some heat was also absorbed from the troposphere (the layer directly below the stratosphere, and the lowest of the layers, where all meteorological events take place). Since the greenhouse gases are in the troposphere, they shield the stratosphere from the heat radiating from the Earth back to space.
I fail to see how this aircraft would be stealthy, even being built with composite material. The huge propellers would shine like hell on a Doppler radar's scope.
Furthermore several two-place fully electric aircraft exists already, they are certified as Light Sports Aircraft, and so have by nature VSTOL capacity by nature...
People tend to forget that the only advantage of the helicopter (or any powered rotary-wing aircraft, excluding autogyros) is the capacity to hover. In all other cases, fixed-wing aircraft are superior in speed, endurance, range, safety, etc. (trade-offs being made to allow either low stall speeds or high dash speeds or high operational altitude or heavy cargo capacity or oversized cargo capacity or CowboyNeal transportation...) You could land some VSTOL aircraft in half a football field, and take off with some restrictions.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow ! This is quite a polarized view. Seen from the other side of the Atlantic, such attitude seem as extremist as the extremist you want to be expelled from 'your' society. I am not an history wonk, but I believe that at some point in time all nations and all religions were welcome in the USA ("Bring me those poor, tired, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free..."). I am sure, not to be too cynic, that it was a ploy to grow the 'european' population faster and 'occupy' the western and northern territories taken from the natives and in order to expand demographically and militarily the young nation ; but nevertheless many immigrants must have held that belief and transmitted that to their descendants.
Well after Waco, TX and 9/11, I am sure the dialogue between religious and atheists must have been a little soured, and I would not think to have reacted differently. But take example on our European mass shooter: Anders Breivik was not acting upon religious imperatives but over cultural purity.
Try to always keep in mind that the mainstream media only shows the extreme opinions, the rarely occuring events, the peculiar trends, the single narrow point-of-view, and that politicians (from either side) only react to those because they want to be in those media for their name to be remembered comes the election. If only people would pay attention to what politicians DO instead of what politicians SAY, well first of all we would put in jail the majority of the politicians who occupy the front page, then we would let the politicians who DO things be heard instead, and eventually we would elect the politicians who would defend your values based on past actions instead of having to decide blind folded between the least crooked of them all. Then we would have a political discourse able to address social issues, which of course the media would put on the front page under misleading or blatantly erroneous titles (why am I thinking of Slashdot right now ?) and which would try to play on misunderstandings and rejections from the people who would not have the time to read the piece or discard the whole thing ; the former (i.e. sensationalist journalists) would have to be fired or only be allowed to do obituaries, the latter (i.e. over-stressed people or shallow people) would have to get trained to put into perspective, to challenge any point-of-view, to question any certainty, to test any axioms, or to accept the impact the beliefs of others (corporations, political or religious groups) has upon ourselves ; my point is: you either think by yourself or you accept that others do the thinking for you, no knowledge is free.
The latest carrier based drones have airborne refueling capabilities just like the manned jets.
If you're talking about Northrop Grumman's X-47 UCAV, it is only developmental and has not yet flown off a carrier... But yes, drones having refueling capability, buddy refueling even more so, are going to set a new standard on mission duration.
But manned jets have to contend with pilot fatigue.
UCAV too in a sense : they are constantly monitored by one or two operators (sometimes even flight-rated pilots), who DO have to manage fatigue; the good thing is they are in a facility where crews can rotate without the aircraft having to provide accommodations for all those people. These aircrafts are unmanned in the sense that there is no man ON BOARD, but there is of course a man (or woman, one or more) in the loop. This is why they are sometimes called "remotely" piloted aircraft.
One of the latest tests off a carrier was a 55 hour non-stop single drone mission. There is not a pilot in the world capable of handling missions of that length. Even the existing manned B-2 bombers that launch missions from the mid-west to targets in the middle east are pushing the limits a pilot can handle.
Wikipedia states that a B-2 mission has lasted 50 hours with round-trip flight from Barksdale AFB to the Middle-East, but I cannot find any reference of it in the official U.S. Air Force website, which states that B-52s during Operation Desert Storm used to undertake missions of 35 hours. In both cases, these are bomber aircrafts which are designed for long duration missions : the B-2 has two pilots, is thoroughly automated, and of course has a toilet. Lockheed's U-2 Dragonlady pilots are not so lucky on their 9 hours mission (see http://www.blackbirds.net/u2/u-2mission.html) at 70k feet in their astronaut-like full pressure suit.
Parent said:
"Get off my lawn!"
I am afraid you have not kept up with XMLHttpRequest and the whole scripting activities currently involved in developing a modern website. It is even said that website development is so complex nowadays[citation needed] that separate professional functions have to divide up the work: designers, programmers, testers, moderators and, of course, trolls.
I too long for the good ol' days of websites being displayed equally "beautifully" in NCSA's Mosaic or ISC's Lynx. STOP vomiting flashing text, animated gifs, flash ads and floating DIVs, DAMMIT!
They have a point, we should shut down the sun to protect us from all that harmful radiation. As a bonus Global Warming will no longer be an issue.
Mod this UP! We should also shut down the universe which emits so much of these damn radiations, and eventually 'live' in an absolute zero absolute maximum entropy state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body
Still this is good news for Algerian separatists, foreign spies etc
I think Algeria is independent and separated from France since 1962, July 3rd.
We have the "Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire" (Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety Institute) and the "Autorité de sûreté nucléaire" (Nuclear Safety Authority) which are the official organizations for the safety of the nuclear installations in France. They are supposedly independent from the industry and the government. Their credibility suffers from a precedent during the Chernobyl catastrophe when the Health ministry's central bureau of protection against ionizing radiation director, Pierre Pellerin, consistently and continuously said the radioactive cloud would not have any impact and no safety precautions should be taken, while all neighbor countries (even Spain and Great Britain which were further down the route of the cloud) had measured elevated radiation on produce.
The CRIIRAD "Commission de recherche et d'information indépendantes sur la radioactivité" (Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity) is the most independant organization since it is not official and uses publicly available data and measures made by independently owned detectors.
About the intrusion by Greenpeace, I find their action disingenuous: the Genarmerie Nationale has now dedicated special groups to the protection of all nuclear plants since this summer, but this takes time to be put in place; other Greenpeace activists have tried to break into several other facilities but were arrested by the local law enforcement (or possibly the said special Gendearmerie groups); furthermore elected officials and experts conducted a live and surprise safety exercise not weeks ago to assess the measures put in place against floods and earthquakes (operation Opera during the night of December 1st).
The problem the Fukushima events showed evidently is that you do not have to make the nuclear reactor go critical and explode to cause a major radiological catastrophe: you just have to cut the power to the control room and safety system that prevents the reactor to sustain and limit its heating-cooling cycle.
Therefore protection against any intrusion or incident is paramount to the safety of the plant, therefore security should be airtight.
Parent post has it right: the Gendarmerie Nationale is in charge of the protection from intrusion into nuclear plants and other facilities and even NBC protection.
http://www.gendarmerie.interieur.gouv.fr/index.php/fre/sites/Gendarmerie/Presentation/securite/The-BRNC-facet
Nuclear plants are also surrounded by restricted air zone enforced by SAM and fast jet interception. See this (french) animation:
http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2011/12/05/01016-20111205ARTFIG00591-comment-sont-protegees-les-centrales-nucleaires.php
Too bad their website is such a cluttered mess built on what appears to be a default CMS template.
I fail to see how this would be detrimental to usability : I am completely comfortable with the layout of the website, if not a little overwhelmed by text and ads...
Not all websites must be Web 3.14 with CSS and AJAX spewing all over the place and a completely separate navigation and history paradigm from you web browser (I hate when I cannot see precisely each "page" I visited on the web, unless of course it is a "news" site inc. Slashdot or Facebook).
Keep it Simple, people ! I want to be able to disable Javascript and every other plugins in my browser and still be allowed to consume the web content, otherwise I won't bother and pick up a good book (THAT's good old nice usability)
The stratosphere is the layer of the atmosphere where temperature goes hotter the higher you go since the ozone gas releases heat when broken into monoatomic oxygen and diatomic oxygen by the ultraviolet rays of the Sun.
I suppose the parent estimated that some heat was also absorbed from the troposphere (the layer directly below the stratosphere, and the lowest of the layers, where all meteorological events take place). Since the greenhouse gases are in the troposphere, they shield the stratosphere from the heat radiating from the Earth back to space.
I fail to see how this aircraft would be stealthy, even being built with composite material. The huge propellers would shine like hell on a Doppler radar's scope.
Furthermore several two-place fully electric aircraft exists already, they are certified as Light Sports Aircraft, and so have by nature VSTOL capacity by nature...
People tend to forget that the only advantage of the helicopter (or any powered rotary-wing aircraft, excluding autogyros) is the capacity to hover. In all other cases, fixed-wing aircraft are superior in speed, endurance, range, safety, etc. (trade-offs being made to allow either low stall speeds or high dash speeds or high operational altitude or heavy cargo capacity or oversized cargo capacity or CowboyNeal transportation...) You could land some VSTOL aircraft in half a football field, and take off with some restrictions.