Furthermore, there was no requirement to stay in the union when the US was formed
You've never read the Articles of Confederation, have you?
Your argument is basically, "The South held slaves, the North were angels trying to swoop down and protect the helpless slaves from their Southern oppressors. Sherman's killing of civilians is perfectly OK in that context."
Nope. My argument is that it was a total war and Sherman destroyed targets of military value. He didn't directly kill civilians; he rendered some civilians homeless, which is a difference that is apparently lost on you. The wanton killing and aimless destruction that you're imagining is a figment of Southern imagination. Special Field Orders No. 120, emphasis mine:
IV. The army will forage liberally on the country during the march. To this end, each brigade commander will organize a good and sufficient foraging party, under the command of one or more discreet officers, who will gather, near the route traveled, corn or forage of any kind, meat of any kind, vegetables, corn-meal, or whatever is needed by the command, aiming at all times to keep in the wagons at least ten day's provisions for the command and three days' forage. Soldiers must not enter the dwellings of the inhabitants, or commit any trespass, but during a halt or a camp they may be permitted to gather turnips, apples, and other vegetables, and to drive in stock of their camp. To regular foraging parties must be instructed the gathering of provisions and forage at any distance from the road traveled.
V. To army corps commanders alone is entrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, etc., and for them this general principle is laid down: In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility.
VI. As for horses, mules, wagons, etc, belonging to the inhabitants, the cavalry and artillery may appropriate freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor or industrious, usually neutral or friendly. Foraging parties may also take mules or horses to replace the jaded animals of their trains, or to serve as pack-mules for the regiments or brigades. In all foraging, of whatever kind, the parties engaged will refrain from abusive or threatening language, and may, where the officer in command thinks proper, give written certificates of the facts, but no receipts, and they will endeavor to leave with each family a reasonable portion for their maintenance....
Spare me the Southern Pride nonsense and moral equivalency. The lion's share of States in the North had abolished slavery. The few slave states were those that remained loyal to the Union, rather than try and tear it asunder, and they were ultimately freed with the passage of the 13th Amendment.
There is no equation between the "clean hands" of the North and South on this particular issue. Nor is there on the issue of treason, since many of the most prominent leaders of the South (including their God, Robert E. Lee) swore oaths to the United States that they later broke. It's not a simple matter of someone fighting for home, these people specifically swore oaths to the United States. As far as I'm concerned the lot of them are traitors and the South got off easy for its crimes against the Union and Humanity.
Greek Fire is an incendiary, it's no more a chemical weapon than napalm is. Using the classical chemistry definition, sure, but not in the context of arms control or warfare.
look at how much a modern day Germany produces mainly from within its own borders through using innovation and well-compensated laborers.
All it took was ten years of total war (WW1 + WW2), 46 years of occupation (1945 - 1990) and massive societal changes that were imposed at gunpoint. All that to civilize a mostly western country with whom we shared a common history, language, and religion. I wonder what it will take to civilize the middle east?
Tell me which of your local stations play Skrillex, or Deltron3030, or insert any random obscure or indie artist here?
None of them, because there are no "local stations" left. In my market all but two FM stations (*) are owned by Clear Channel or Citadel; they all play Top 40 crap that you can literally set your watch to. "Oh, Nickelback. It must be quarter to two." They fired all of the local talent too, piping in national morning shows that suck donkey balls.
The two FM stations that aren't Clear Channel/Citadel are our local PBS/NPR affiliate and a local classic rock station that's somehow hanging on. If I'm on too short of a drive to bother hooking up my phone for Pandora I'll listen to one of them. Failing those two, our only "local" option is an AM talk radio station, which actually has a solid local news operation. Too bad they fill out the schedule with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
Why is the federal government (and its agencies) so scared to allow state and local law enforcement agencies to reveal the use of these devices?
Another question: How can it be legal to transmit on licensed frequencies owned by someone else? Perhaps the Feds have an exemption to the Radio Act but State and Local Governments? Not bloody likely. Why aren't the cellular carriers screaming bloody murder about this? They paid billions of dollars to license their spectrum. Modern digital networks are laid out very precisely, with a need to carefully account for the location of each transmitter and to control their output power to avoid interference with neighboring cells. There is no way that a device like Stingray can be used without causing interference to other users.
In most states the victim could have used deadly force to defend himself and easily gotten away with it.
My sister is a part time LEO and retired member of the Air Force; she's working one night at a convenience store when some would be robber pulls a "gun" on her. She's complying with him long enough to draw her own firearm when she realizes that it's a BB gun. At that point she tells him to leave, he says "I'm not screwing with you bitch." whereupon she takes the BB gun away from him and uses it as a club to beat the ever living shit out of him. The only reason that idiot went to the hospital rather than the morgue was the cool-headedness of his would be victim. Most other people (including many LEOs) would have just shot the son of a bitch.
The best part was when he tried to sue her after the fact, in Louisiana, a state with a civil immunity law for injuries resulting from justifiable self-defense. She got court costs on that one, paid by his ambulance chasing scumbag attorney.
The problem is not if the weapon could cause harm but if you believed it would and thereby was forced to act in ways you wouldn't to protect your life.
The other problem is the potential for escalation; if I think you're threatening me with deadly force I'm allowed to respond in kind in all 50 States in the Union. Pulling that BB gun might not seem like the best idea when your would-be victim pulls a real firearm and puts two real bullets into your chest.
The National Security Agency (NSA) is a United States intelligence agency responsible for global monitoring, collection, decoding, translation and analysis of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes - a discipline known as Signals intelligence (SIGINT). NSA is also charged with protection of U.S. government communications and information systems against penetration and network warfare. The agency is authorized to accomplish its mission through clandestine means, among which are bugging electronic systems and allegedly engaging in sabotage through subversive software.
The new test, produced by Corgenix, a company in Broomfield, Colorado, uses antibodies to identify a specific Ebola virus protein. The list price will be about $15 per test, says Robert Garry, a hemorrhagic disease expert at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, who helped develop the test. But discounts will be available, he says, for bulk purchases and suppliers for use in Africa.
Medicial Device Excise Tax: That's $0.345 per tax at the non-bulk rate into Uncle Sam's coffers. I wonder how much purchasing power $0.345 has in the regions hardest hit by Ebola?
Even here in wifi-heavy Portland, OR, you're going to have a hard time finding wifi signals you can glom onto w/o either knowing the WPA2 password, or going through some sort of web-based login screen - especially in the suburbs.
That's one of the things I miss about Finland; the lion's share of the public wi-fi networks don't waste your time with a stupid disclaimer/logon webpage. You connect to them, get an IP address, and you're off and running. The only one out of the dozens that I used where I can recall a logon webpage was on OnniBus.
Add this to the list of things that our sue happy culture has ruined. You'll never see that duplicated here, because some jackass will sue if little orphan Annie uses your hotspot to look at porn, or his laptop picks up malware, or even just because Saul Goodman has nothing better to do today and needs a new suit jacket or bluetooth headset.
I had the Nokia flip phone that implemented it back in 2006-2007. The Wi-Fi calling worked great in my experience, seamless handoff back and forth with the macro cellular network; it would even roam between different APs (my employer needed four APs to cover our entire building) without dropping calls. The problem was that Nokia was prone to crashing for other reasons, even with the Wi-Fi turned off, it had very buggy software and I eventually tired of it shutting down for no reason. They had two other phones that supported it, one of them a Blackberry, but I never got around to experimenting with them.
My favorite T-Mobile phone was the Motorola v195s; that thing had a radio in it that could hold the weakest signal without dropping calls (always a consideration for T-Mobile customers in suburban/rural markets), as well as an eight hour talk time with the factory battery. It was just a phone, didn't even have a camera, but it was and in some ways still is my favorite cell phone out of the dozens that I've owned over the years.
I really liked T-Mobile, they introduced me to the awesomeness of GSM, amongst other things, and it was with a heavy heart that I switched back to Verizon when my job took me to a city where T-Mobile had no coverage. If Verizon ever yanks my unlimited data plan I'll be back on T-Mobile in a New York Minute; I've thought about doing it anyway but their coverage is grossly inferior around these parts, which would be worth putting up with if they could save me money, but with my grandfathered Verizon pricing + employee discount I'm paying less with Verizon than anything T-Mo can offer me. Hard to justify paying more for less, no matter how awesome they are or how much of an asshat Verizon can be.
Republic Wireless's parent company, Bandwidth.com, a telecommunications provider with about 400 employees, developed a technique to move calls seamlessly between different Wi-Fi networks and cell towers.
That's been around forever. T-Mobile had this back in 2006 or 2007. It's called Generic Access Network. I played around with it back in the day when T-Mobile gave you unlimited calling if you subscribed to this, they even had a specially branded version of the WRT-54GL called the WRT-54TM, which I still have. It apparently did some power saving stuff that the standard WRT54GL didn't implement at the time,ich I'm just standard WMM; it makes for a nice dd-wrt router, since the T-Mobile model had more memory than the standard WRT-54GL, supposedly they requested that so they could add more features down the line. Ultimately they abandoned the concept of free wi-fi calling, there were only three phones that supported it back in the day, though it's my understanding that they still use the same technology so their customers can place calls while traveling aboard without paying roaming rates.
Anyway, I digress. This reeks of a press release that was issued to generate buzz and stock purchases. Is this what/. has come to? There's nothing new here. These ideas were discussed in the early 2000s and largely moved away from. Voice minutes aren't a significant expense for cellular carriers these days.
First of all, you've got TNG classified in the wrong category. It's not science fiction, it's a drama set on a spaceship. Where's the science?
*shrug*, it's set on a space ship, in the future, where faster than light travel is a reality and most consumer goods can be created out of thin air. I think that makes it sci-fi; if you want to split hairs you could go with the downstream definition, though I think that's kind of silly.
The episodes have aged badly. I tried watching a few a while back and it was just painful.
I don't have that experience at all. A few of them are downright painful (The Dauphin, Manhunt, Up the Long Ladder) but those episodes were the ones that were downright painful when they originally aired. I can marathon the 3rd and 4th seasons over a long weekend and find those episodes just as compelling today as when they first aired.
Compare it to Sopranos or Deadwood or Game of Thrones or any of the modern shows, it falls flat.
Of those three I've only seen Sopranos, which I enjoyed a great deal (enough to own the DVD box sets) but I do not consider it to be as good as TNG. To each their own I suppose, but I think TNG harkens back to a day when TV dramas didn't have to be dark, depressing and have chaotic evil protagonists. I liked Breaking Bad too, more than the Sopranos, but still not as much as TNG.
However, It's far easier to identify with the BSG characters, because they're closer to real human beings than the characters in star trek ever were, or could be. Consistent and perpetual moral high ground that is ultimately always right with no grey areas?
Huh? I don't even need to quote DS9 (though it would so easy to do so) to shoot down this point. TNG Episodes: The Wounded, The First Duty, Ensign Ro, The Most Toys, Silicon Avatar, and The Pegasus. That's off the top of my head. There are plenty of TNG episodes that didn't present "consistent and perpetual moral high ground." Some of them raised tough questions (The Most Toys and Silicon Avatar, when is killing in self-defense justified?), some presented characters behaving like self-serving assholes (The First Duty, The Pegasus), others had moral ambiguity and unhappy endings (The Wounded).
And if it's a viewpoint character you're looking for, there's always Chief O'Brien. The rest of them weren't supposed to be viewpoint characters. The whole point to TNG was that these people are the best of the best, that was stated over and over in the show, they're supposed to be the people that you look up to, not people that you can see yourself as.
Incidentally, I really liked the BSG remake, but it came off the rails at the end with the religious/destiny nonsense that always made me reach for the fast forward button on my DVR. Not coincidentally, the Prophets subplot on DS9 was my least favorite part of that show.
One would assume that a snowstorm isn't going to destroy the on-site backup generations as a tsunami can. This seems like an overabundance of caution to, though IANANP, and if the grid can absorb the shutdown I suppose there's nothing wrong with excessive caution. There's a bit in TFA about them doing maintenance that required a shutdown during the last forced shutdown, so maybe they're planning to do the same here rather than do it over the summer months when energy prices and demand are higher.
Since you bought up Fukushima, I've long wondered how a modern first world nation-state could not manage to get generators on-site before the batteries went flat. I've read that the utility tried but could not get them there in time due to traffic jam and destroyed infrastructure on the ground. Did nobody think of picking up the phone and calling someone at the military to dispatch some bloody helicopters? I can't fathom that you need so much power to run cooling pumps as to render the required generators too heavy to fly in.
How about mentioning that Washington closed to within 7700 m of Kirishima - point blank range[*]
Duke of York opened fire on Scharnhorst at 10,900 m - pretty close to point blank.
Which was my whole point in response to your remarks about maximum range accuracy. No surface action was ever fought or planned at maximum range. The weapons were not as inaccurate as you claim they are, not at maximum range, and certainly not at the ranges they were actually employed at.
Washington got 9 hits on Kirishima for 75 main gun rounds fired at Kirishima (rounds were also fired at other targets)
Modern examinations suggest that she got 20 main battery hits, which is the figure Hornfischer quotes. Where did you find the 75 shots fired figure? I was looking for Washington's after action report, there used to be a USS Washington memorial page that had it, but it seems to have disappeared; all I could come up with was the total number of shots fired in the entire engagement.
As for the Japanese destroyer - it never was hit by the battleship. It got away.
Yes, she did; but there was still a first salvo straddle at extreme range. Actually multiple straddles, there's a write up of that engagement somewhere and the Iowa was using a combination of radar fire control and aerial spotting. The destroyer had a speed advantage and so escaped that way, which begs the question of why no aircraft were available for a strike, but such details are presumably lost to history for an insignificant engagement that has no name.
but again, just like Bismarck, it took torpedoes to finish the job.
Kirishima was done in solely by gunfire, the aforementioned link disputes the notion that she was scuttled. Of course, at the end of the day it doesn't really matter does it? Gunfire was enough to mission kill any warship afloat, in short order, and sustained gunfire would leave them a floating wreck even if the engineering plant remained functional. Bismarck was doomed even without the torpedoes and/or scuttling, as was Scharnhorst. One might even say that South Dakota was mission killed by inferior shells (mostly 5" and 8" hits to her superstructure, her armor defeated the one 14" round that found her, on the aft barbette) although poor damage control (she really was a bad luck ship) played a role as well. Then of course there's the example of what 5" shells managed to do to Japanese cruisers and battleships off Samar.
This means that even if the control rods are slammed in when the power transmission lines were cut the previous heat load would still be generated for a period of time.
The cooling system is designed with such considerations in mind. The plant isn't going to melt down even if you cut the transmission lines directly at the plant and have to quickly power the reactors down. The line about "a potential loss of offsite power" is perhaps more telling, they use offsite power to operate the control mechanisms and cooling systems if they have to shut the reactors down, though one would presume that they also have UPSes and diesel generators on site.
While computerized and radar-based fire control is a wonderful thing, they don't address variability in muzzle velocity.
You're firing a salvo; whatever disparity there is in muzzle velocity will average itself out.
More to the point, the GP's claims are belied by the historical record. Surface actions weren't fought at maximum range, even in the daylight, nor was the disparity in muzzle velocity as great as he claims or a factor in real world deployments. Chapter 20, Neptune's Inferno, emphasis mine:
In offset gunnery exercises with the Atlanta, the Washington put on a show.
With the battleship firing from thirty-five thousand yards, far over the horizon and out of sight except for the top of her mast, Mustin stationed himself on the Atlanta's fantail with an apparatus to measure and report where the battleship's projectiles landed. When the Washington let loose, a gout of yellow-brown muzzle smoke would blot the horizon. Then, after a certain lapse of time, came a crash of heavy shells in the sea, followed by a supersonic crack and the rippling roll of the guns from below the horizon. The shells landed smack in the middle of the Atlanta's wake, raising columns of seawater, closely clustered. Mustin knew the discipline that underlay not only the accuracy but also the tightness of the pattern. Willis Lee and Captain Glenn B. Davis knew what they were doing. "They didn't come down over and short. They came down right on, meaning that the Washington's battery was beautifully aligned and beautifully calibrated. Those 2,700 pound armor-piercing projectiles were going to be very bad news for anybody they were ever aimed at."
That's from the real world, not the theoretical, during a gunnery exercise held far in excess of the range at which ship to ship actions fought and they still maintained to attain a tight pattern. Note that they were shooting at the wake of a friendly vessel; a miscalculation could have very dire consequences but these sorts of "offset gunnery" exercises were routine.
The GP can spout whatever he wants about theoretical disparities in muzzle velocity but the people who built and manned these ships were some of the brightest minds of the day. They knew what they were doing.
If the variability of muzzle speed between rounds is the limiting factor for accuracy
It's not. The GP doesn't understand gunnery. I'm guessing the GP is someone who takes his rifle out once a month and blames variability in the ammunition for his larger than desired groups. Warship engagements were never fought at maximum range and the hit rates were never as low as he suggests they were, even in the pre-radar days.
how would radar guidance be an improvement
Because you can instantly obtain the range, course, and speed of your desired target. And you can do it while maneuvering your own ship to complicate the enemy's task of obtaining those variables against you. The alternative is to obtain this information through optical range-finding, which relies on known values (height of the enemy ship) that may be incorrect (you misidentify the opposing ship, or your intelligence guys obtained bad information about her height before the war) or influenced by optical distortions and wave action. Ultimately you would have to walk your fire into the target to get the correct range, since the range-finders could only give you an estimate, and this process took time. Essentially you're trying to solve a seven or eight variable algebraic equation while only starting with half of the variables, some of which may well be incorrect.
Radar made that a moot point. Now you've instantly got not only the range but the course and speed of your adversary. Your own course and speed are known variables, so now all you've got to do is compute the applicable firing solution (direction, elevation, and powder charge) for your gun crews and start shooting. This is where computerized gunnery tables come into the process; it could be done by hand but in the USN and RN it was a largely automated process by the time WW2 rolled around.
We didn't have much choice but to rely on surface combatants and submarines.
I'm smacking my head at this line. There were no US submarines committed to the Guadalcanal campaign. Why they weren't is a good question in hindsight, they might have been able to make those runs up and down the slot expensive for the IJN, but for better or worse they were not utilized to any significant degree by the USN in this campaign.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, there was no requirement to stay in the union when the US was formed
You've never read the Articles of Confederation, have you?
Your argument is basically, "The South held slaves, the North were angels trying to swoop down and protect the helpless slaves from their Southern oppressors. Sherman's killing of civilians is perfectly OK in that context."
Nope. My argument is that it was a total war and Sherman destroyed targets of military value. He didn't directly kill civilians; he rendered some civilians homeless, which is a difference that is apparently lost on you. The wanton killing and aimless destruction that you're imagining is a figment of Southern imagination. Special Field Orders No. 120, emphasis mine:
IV. The army will forage liberally on the country during the march. To this end, each brigade commander will organize a good and sufficient foraging party, under the command of one or more discreet officers, who will gather, near the route traveled, corn or forage of any kind, meat of any kind, vegetables, corn-meal, or whatever is needed by the command, aiming at all times to keep in the wagons at least ten day's provisions for the command and three days' forage. Soldiers must not enter the dwellings of the inhabitants, or commit any trespass, but during a halt or a camp they may be permitted to gather turnips, apples, and other vegetables, and to drive in stock of their camp. To regular foraging parties must be instructed the gathering of provisions and forage at any distance from the road traveled.
V. To army corps commanders alone is entrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, etc., and for them this general principle is laid down: In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility.
VI. As for horses, mules, wagons, etc, belonging to the inhabitants, the cavalry and artillery may appropriate freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor or industrious, usually neutral or friendly. Foraging parties may also take mules or horses to replace the jaded animals of their trains, or to serve as pack-mules for the regiments or brigades. In all foraging, of whatever kind, the parties engaged will refrain from abusive or threatening language, and may, where the officer in command thinks proper, give written certificates of the facts, but no receipts, and they will endeavor to leave with each family a reasonable portion for their maintenance....
Spare me the Southern Pride nonsense and moral equivalency. The lion's share of States in the North had abolished slavery. The few slave states were those that remained loyal to the Union, rather than try and tear it asunder, and they were ultimately freed with the passage of the 13th Amendment.
There is no equation between the "clean hands" of the North and South on this particular issue. Nor is there on the issue of treason, since many of the most prominent leaders of the South (including their God, Robert E. Lee) swore oaths to the United States that they later broke. It's not a simple matter of someone fighting for home, these people specifically swore oaths to the United States. As far as I'm concerned the lot of them are traitors and the South got off easy for its crimes against the Union and Humanity.
To you he may be a hero, but to Southerners, he is a mass murderer of women and children
I'm guessing Black Southerners have a different opinion of him.
Greek Fire is an incendiary, it's no more a chemical weapon than napalm is. Using the classical chemistry definition, sure, but not in the context of arms control or warfare.
look at how much a modern day Germany produces mainly from within its own borders through using innovation and well-compensated laborers.
All it took was ten years of total war (WW1 + WW2), 46 years of occupation (1945 - 1990) and massive societal changes that were imposed at gunpoint. All that to civilize a mostly western country with whom we shared a common history, language, and religion. I wonder what it will take to civilize the middle east?
Tell me which of your local stations play Skrillex, or Deltron3030, or insert any random obscure or indie artist here?
None of them, because there are no "local stations" left. In my market all but two FM stations (*) are owned by Clear Channel or Citadel; they all play Top 40 crap that you can literally set your watch to. "Oh, Nickelback. It must be quarter to two." They fired all of the local talent too, piping in national morning shows that suck donkey balls.
The two FM stations that aren't Clear Channel/Citadel are our local PBS/NPR affiliate and a local classic rock station that's somehow hanging on. If I'm on too short of a drive to bother hooking up my phone for Pandora I'll listen to one of them. Failing those two, our only "local" option is an AM talk radio station, which actually has a solid local news operation. Too bad they fill out the schedule with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
Not anymore my friend. They got rid of the Grandfathering a few months ago. I had quite the e-mail exchange back and forth with them about it.
It's still a bargain at that price of course, but I still wasn't happy about it....
Why is the federal government (and its agencies) so scared to allow state and local law enforcement agencies to reveal the use of these devices?
Another question: How can it be legal to transmit on licensed frequencies owned by someone else? Perhaps the Feds have an exemption to the Radio Act but State and Local Governments? Not bloody likely. Why aren't the cellular carriers screaming bloody murder about this? They paid billions of dollars to license their spectrum. Modern digital networks are laid out very precisely, with a need to carefully account for the location of each transmitter and to control their output power to avoid interference with neighboring cells. There is no way that a device like Stingray can be used without causing interference to other users.
I do not want to think what it could do to an eye.
You'll shoot your eye out kid.
In most states the victim could have used deadly force to defend himself and easily gotten away with it.
My sister is a part time LEO and retired member of the Air Force; she's working one night at a convenience store when some would be robber pulls a "gun" on her. She's complying with him long enough to draw her own firearm when she realizes that it's a BB gun. At that point she tells him to leave, he says "I'm not screwing with you bitch." whereupon she takes the BB gun away from him and uses it as a club to beat the ever living shit out of him. The only reason that idiot went to the hospital rather than the morgue was the cool-headedness of his would be victim. Most other people (including many LEOs) would have just shot the son of a bitch.
The best part was when he tried to sue her after the fact, in Louisiana, a state with a civil immunity law for injuries resulting from justifiable self-defense. She got court costs on that one, paid by his ambulance chasing scumbag attorney.
The problem is not if the weapon could cause harm but if you believed it would and thereby was forced to act in ways you wouldn't to protect your life.
The other problem is the potential for escalation; if I think you're threatening me with deadly force I'm allowed to respond in kind in all 50 States in the Union. Pulling that BB gun might not seem like the best idea when your would-be victim pulls a real firearm and puts two real bullets into your chest.
You do know Pandora has a very inexpensive ($3.99/mo) option that eliminates all advertisements and comes with a few fringe benefits, right?
I haven't heard an ad on Pandora in 6 years.
The National Security Agency (NSA) is a United States intelligence agency responsible for global monitoring, collection, decoding, translation and analysis of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes - a discipline known as Signals intelligence (SIGINT). NSA is also charged with protection of U.S. government communications and information systems against penetration and network warfare. The agency is authorized to accomplish its mission through clandestine means, among which are bugging electronic systems and allegedly engaging in sabotage through subversive software.
The new test, produced by Corgenix, a company in Broomfield, Colorado, uses antibodies to identify a specific Ebola virus protein. The list price will be about $15 per test, says Robert Garry, a hemorrhagic disease expert at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, who helped develop the test. But discounts will be available, he says, for bulk purchases and suppliers for use in Africa.
Medicial Device Excise Tax: That's $0.345 per tax at the non-bulk rate into Uncle Sam's coffers. I wonder how much purchasing power $0.345 has in the regions hardest hit by Ebola?
Even here in wifi-heavy Portland, OR, you're going to have a hard time finding wifi signals you can glom onto w/o either knowing the WPA2 password, or going through some sort of web-based login screen - especially in the suburbs.
That's one of the things I miss about Finland; the lion's share of the public wi-fi networks don't waste your time with a stupid disclaimer/logon webpage. You connect to them, get an IP address, and you're off and running. The only one out of the dozens that I used where I can recall a logon webpage was on OnniBus.
Add this to the list of things that our sue happy culture has ruined. You'll never see that duplicated here, because some jackass will sue if little orphan Annie uses your hotspot to look at porn, or his laptop picks up malware, or even just because Saul Goodman has nothing better to do today and needs a new suit jacket or bluetooth headset.
I had the Nokia flip phone that implemented it back in 2006-2007. The Wi-Fi calling worked great in my experience, seamless handoff back and forth with the macro cellular network; it would even roam between different APs (my employer needed four APs to cover our entire building) without dropping calls. The problem was that Nokia was prone to crashing for other reasons, even with the Wi-Fi turned off, it had very buggy software and I eventually tired of it shutting down for no reason. They had two other phones that supported it, one of them a Blackberry, but I never got around to experimenting with them.
My favorite T-Mobile phone was the Motorola v195s; that thing had a radio in it that could hold the weakest signal without dropping calls (always a consideration for T-Mobile customers in suburban/rural markets), as well as an eight hour talk time with the factory battery. It was just a phone, didn't even have a camera, but it was and in some ways still is my favorite cell phone out of the dozens that I've owned over the years.
I really liked T-Mobile, they introduced me to the awesomeness of GSM, amongst other things, and it was with a heavy heart that I switched back to Verizon when my job took me to a city where T-Mobile had no coverage. If Verizon ever yanks my unlimited data plan I'll be back on T-Mobile in a New York Minute; I've thought about doing it anyway but their coverage is grossly inferior around these parts, which would be worth putting up with if they could save me money, but with my grandfathered Verizon pricing + employee discount I'm paying less with Verizon than anything T-Mo can offer me. Hard to justify paying more for less, no matter how awesome they are or how much of an asshat Verizon can be.
Republic Wireless's parent company, Bandwidth.com, a telecommunications provider with about 400 employees, developed a technique to move calls seamlessly between different Wi-Fi networks and cell towers.
That's been around forever. T-Mobile had this back in 2006 or 2007. It's called Generic Access Network. I played around with it back in the day when T-Mobile gave you unlimited calling if you subscribed to this, they even had a specially branded version of the WRT-54GL called the WRT-54TM, which I still have. It apparently did some power saving stuff that the standard WRT54GL didn't implement at the time,ich I'm just standard WMM; it makes for a nice dd-wrt router, since the T-Mobile model had more memory than the standard WRT-54GL, supposedly they requested that so they could add more features down the line. Ultimately they abandoned the concept of free wi-fi calling, there were only three phones that supported it back in the day, though it's my understanding that they still use the same technology so their customers can place calls while traveling aboard without paying roaming rates.
Anyway, I digress. This reeks of a press release that was issued to generate buzz and stock purchases. Is this what /. has come to? There's nothing new here. These ideas were discussed in the early 2000s and largely moved away from. Voice minutes aren't a significant expense for cellular carriers these days.
First of all, you've got TNG classified in the wrong category. It's not science fiction, it's a drama set on a spaceship. Where's the science?
*shrug*, it's set on a space ship, in the future, where faster than light travel is a reality and most consumer goods can be created out of thin air. I think that makes it sci-fi; if you want to split hairs you could go with the downstream definition, though I think that's kind of silly.
The episodes have aged badly. I tried watching a few a while back and it was just painful.
I don't have that experience at all. A few of them are downright painful (The Dauphin, Manhunt, Up the Long Ladder) but those episodes were the ones that were downright painful when they originally aired. I can marathon the 3rd and 4th seasons over a long weekend and find those episodes just as compelling today as when they first aired.
Compare it to Sopranos or Deadwood or Game of Thrones or any of the modern shows, it falls flat.
Of those three I've only seen Sopranos, which I enjoyed a great deal (enough to own the DVD box sets) but I do not consider it to be as good as TNG. To each their own I suppose, but I think TNG harkens back to a day when TV dramas didn't have to be dark, depressing and have chaotic evil protagonists. I liked Breaking Bad too, more than the Sopranos, but still not as much as TNG.
However, It's far easier to identify with the BSG characters, because they're closer to real human beings than the characters in star trek ever were, or could be. Consistent and perpetual moral high ground that is ultimately always right with no grey areas?
Huh? I don't even need to quote DS9 (though it would so easy to do so) to shoot down this point. TNG Episodes: The Wounded, The First Duty, Ensign Ro, The Most Toys, Silicon Avatar, and The Pegasus. That's off the top of my head. There are plenty of TNG episodes that didn't present "consistent and perpetual moral high ground." Some of them raised tough questions (The Most Toys and Silicon Avatar, when is killing in self-defense justified?), some presented characters behaving like self-serving assholes (The First Duty, The Pegasus), others had moral ambiguity and unhappy endings (The Wounded).
And if it's a viewpoint character you're looking for, there's always Chief O'Brien. The rest of them weren't supposed to be viewpoint characters. The whole point to TNG was that these people are the best of the best, that was stated over and over in the show, they're supposed to be the people that you look up to, not people that you can see yourself as.
Incidentally, I really liked the BSG remake, but it came off the rails at the end with the religious/destiny nonsense that always made me reach for the fast forward button on my DVR. Not coincidentally, the Prophets subplot on DS9 was my least favorite part of that show.
One would assume that a snowstorm isn't going to destroy the on-site backup generations as a tsunami can. This seems like an overabundance of caution to, though IANANP, and if the grid can absorb the shutdown I suppose there's nothing wrong with excessive caution. There's a bit in TFA about them doing maintenance that required a shutdown during the last forced shutdown, so maybe they're planning to do the same here rather than do it over the summer months when energy prices and demand are higher.
Since you bought up Fukushima, I've long wondered how a modern first world nation-state could not manage to get generators on-site before the batteries went flat. I've read that the utility tried but could not get them there in time due to traffic jam and destroyed infrastructure on the ground. Did nobody think of picking up the phone and calling someone at the military to dispatch some bloody helicopters? I can't fathom that you need so much power to run cooling pumps as to render the required generators too heavy to fly in.
How about mentioning that Washington closed to within 7700 m of Kirishima - point blank range[*]
Duke of York opened fire on Scharnhorst at 10,900 m - pretty close to point blank.
Which was my whole point in response to your remarks about maximum range accuracy. No surface action was ever fought or planned at maximum range. The weapons were not as inaccurate as you claim they are, not at maximum range, and certainly not at the ranges they were actually employed at.
Washington got 9 hits on Kirishima for 75 main gun rounds fired at Kirishima (rounds were also fired at other targets)
Modern examinations suggest that she got 20 main battery hits, which is the figure Hornfischer quotes. Where did you find the 75 shots fired figure? I was looking for Washington's after action report, there used to be a USS Washington memorial page that had it, but it seems to have disappeared; all I could come up with was the total number of shots fired in the entire engagement.
As for the Japanese destroyer - it never was hit by the battleship. It got away.
Yes, she did; but there was still a first salvo straddle at extreme range. Actually multiple straddles, there's a write up of that engagement somewhere and the Iowa was using a combination of radar fire control and aerial spotting. The destroyer had a speed advantage and so escaped that way, which begs the question of why no aircraft were available for a strike, but such details are presumably lost to history for an insignificant engagement that has no name.
but again, just like Bismarck, it took torpedoes to finish the job.
Kirishima was done in solely by gunfire, the aforementioned link disputes the notion that she was scuttled. Of course, at the end of the day it doesn't really matter does it? Gunfire was enough to mission kill any warship afloat, in short order, and sustained gunfire would leave them a floating wreck even if the engineering plant remained functional. Bismarck was doomed even without the torpedoes and/or scuttling, as was Scharnhorst. One might even say that South Dakota was mission killed by inferior shells (mostly 5" and 8" hits to her superstructure, her armor defeated the one 14" round that found her, on the aft barbette) although poor damage control (she really was a bad luck ship) played a role as well. Then of course there's the example of what 5" shells managed to do to Japanese cruisers and battleships off Samar.
This means that even if the control rods are slammed in when the power transmission lines were cut the previous heat load would still be generated for a period of time.
The cooling system is designed with such considerations in mind. The plant isn't going to melt down even if you cut the transmission lines directly at the plant and have to quickly power the reactors down. The line about "a potential loss of offsite power" is perhaps more telling, they use offsite power to operate the control mechanisms and cooling systems if they have to shut the reactors down, though one would presume that they also have UPSes and diesel generators on site.
While computerized and radar-based fire control is a wonderful thing, they don't address variability in muzzle velocity.
You're firing a salvo; whatever disparity there is in muzzle velocity will average itself out.
More to the point, the GP's claims are belied by the historical record. Surface actions weren't fought at maximum range, even in the daylight, nor was the disparity in muzzle velocity as great as he claims or a factor in real world deployments. Chapter 20, Neptune's Inferno, emphasis mine:
In offset gunnery exercises with the Atlanta, the Washington put on a show.
With the battleship firing from thirty-five thousand yards, far over the horizon and out of sight except for the top of her mast, Mustin stationed himself on the Atlanta's fantail with an apparatus to measure and report where the battleship's projectiles landed. When the Washington let loose, a gout of yellow-brown muzzle smoke would blot the horizon. Then, after a certain lapse of time, came a crash of heavy shells in the sea, followed by a supersonic crack and the rippling roll of the guns from below the horizon. The shells landed smack in the middle of the Atlanta's wake, raising columns of seawater, closely clustered. Mustin knew the discipline that underlay not only the accuracy but also the tightness of the pattern. Willis Lee and Captain Glenn B. Davis knew what they were doing. "They didn't come down over and short. They came down right on, meaning that the Washington's battery was beautifully aligned and beautifully calibrated. Those 2,700 pound armor-piercing projectiles were going to be very bad news for anybody they were ever aimed at."
That's from the real world, not the theoretical, during a gunnery exercise held far in excess of the range at which ship to ship actions fought and they still maintained to attain a tight pattern. Note that they were shooting at the wake of a friendly vessel; a miscalculation could have very dire consequences but these sorts of "offset gunnery" exercises were routine.
The GP can spout whatever he wants about theoretical disparities in muzzle velocity but the people who built and manned these ships were some of the brightest minds of the day. They knew what they were doing.
If the variability of muzzle speed between rounds is the limiting factor for accuracy
It's not. The GP doesn't understand gunnery. I'm guessing the GP is someone who takes his rifle out once a month and blames variability in the ammunition for his larger than desired groups. Warship engagements were never fought at maximum range and the hit rates were never as low as he suggests they were, even in the pre-radar days.
how would radar guidance be an improvement
Because you can instantly obtain the range, course, and speed of your desired target. And you can do it while maneuvering your own ship to complicate the enemy's task of obtaining those variables against you. The alternative is to obtain this information through optical range-finding, which relies on known values (height of the enemy ship) that may be incorrect (you misidentify the opposing ship, or your intelligence guys obtained bad information about her height before the war) or influenced by optical distortions and wave action. Ultimately you would have to walk your fire into the target to get the correct range, since the range-finders could only give you an estimate, and this process took time. Essentially you're trying to solve a seven or eight variable algebraic equation while only starting with half of the variables, some of which may well be incorrect.
Radar made that a moot point. Now you've instantly got not only the range but the course and speed of your adversary. Your own course and speed are known variables, so now all you've got to do is compute the applicable firing solution (direction, elevation, and powder charge) for your gun crews and start shooting. This is where computerized gunnery tables come into the process; it could be done by hand but in the USN and RN it was a largely automated process by the time WW2 rolled around.
We didn't have much choice but to rely on surface combatants and submarines.
I'm smacking my head at this line. There were no US submarines committed to the Guadalcanal campaign. Why they weren't is a good question in hindsight, they might have been able to make those runs up and down the slot expensive for the IJN, but for better or worse they were not utilized to any significant degree by the USN in this campaign.