More efficient by what standards? Price? For just bringing up a couple of crewmembers, Soyuz probably is. But if your mission involves delivering lots of cargo, it might not be.
As of now, the shuttle is capable of a fully automatic landing--except for the part about lowering the landing gear. NASA came up with a rube goldberg-looking method to do that, involving running a couple cables to various places, loading a special flight software version, and sending a certain command at a given time (or something like that). I've read the entire procedure before on usenet; can't access it here at work though.
Nope. Starship Troopers was originally a book by Robert Heinlein. I suggest you read it; if you haven't seen the movie yet, just read the book and ignore the movie.
The movie was originally going to be called Bug Wars, or something like that. Part of the way through production, they discovered Heinlein's book, with a similar concept (space troopers vs. aliens), and adopted the name and some plot points. However, they completely bastardized and fucked over the book, which was partly written to explore the justification behind use of force. There was a fair bit of political commentary throughout (whether you agree with it or not is a different matter). The movie just shows the military/government in a light not much different from the Nazis, and has as much in common with the book as the I, Robot movie did with its namesake. Both are the equivalent of pissing on their respective author's grave.
Reportedly (haven't seen it myself, but I intend to) was the animated series Roughnecks. It follows Heinlein's idea a lot closer.
"Ok... what exactly is wrong with consenting adults??? How can you get any more puritan than that? Is he really that much out of touch with reality that he can even begin to think that there's anything wrong with that and furthermore, that HE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT???
Ahemm... sorry, but the degree of mental retardation needed to keep such views in today's society keeps astounding me."
The real problem is that so many people sit there and say, "They shouldn't be allowed to do $thing". Nobody ever sits there and says, "Dammit, I shouldn't be allowed to do this!"
"there are plenty of areas in the desert SW that would allow for launches over uninhabited territories."
I doubt it. Remember, the boost phase is very long--the shuttle is somewhere up by Newfoundland (I think) by the end of the launch. Draw a line heading northeast or southeast from some point in the southwest, and you are definitely going to pass over populated areas. And the fuel savings would be negligible. Ice/foam problems wouldn't be helped; even desert air still has a good bit of water in it, and when cryogenics are involved, you're still going to get plenty of ice. The only benefit of a different launch site would be weather--Florida is the king of pop-up thunderstorms, and is a big fat bullseye for hurricanes.
Also remember that the boosters need somewhere to fall so they can be recovered.
There were plans to launch from Vandenburg, too, but that's also next to water.
It wasn't the fault of stealth not working. Current theories (at least from my rusty memory) for the reason the F-117 was shot down are as follows; it is likely that many (if not all) of them contributed:
1: Leadership dictated that strike aircraft follow the same flight paths in/out of the target area, night after night.
2: Enemy intelligence revealed some of the flight paths being used.
3: Stealth aircraft are vulnerable to radar detection when their weapons bays are open. The aircraft may have been detected momentarily. Also, it is possible that the doors didn't close all the way, or that there was some kind of flaw (screw sticking up, improperly sealed panel, etc) making the aircraft easier to detect.
4: The missile used to shoot the aircraft down was probably not using radar guidance. Many Soviet/Russian SAM systems incorporated a backup optical (manual command-guided) mode; this could have been used and there would have been no warning. Alternatively, the aircraft may not have been precisely targeted; a blind barrage of flak/missiles may have been shot up in the expected flight path, just hoping to hit something.
Current stealth technology does not make aircraft (or anything else) invisible to radar. It merely reduces the "signature," the amount of radar energy reflected back to the receiver, with the expectation that said receiver will either filter it out as noise, or not be sensitive enough to detect it at all.
I know you've probably heard about the "stealth-detecting radar" and the cell-phone-tower technique. It is true that there are ways to detect stealh aircraft using radar systems, but those methods generally either require massive computational power, or use such low frequencies that the aircraft is detected, but you can't locate it very precisely. After some observation, you could probably get a rough idea of heading and speed, but nothing even remotely close to useable for weapons targeting. That requires use of higher-frequency setups, which the stealth tech is more effective against. Even then, a high-frequency radar could detect stealth aircraft (say, at 1 mile as opposed to 100mi with conventional aircraft), but you need insanely high power to do so at longer ranges, and you won't find that kind of power on most fire-control radars.
Again, stealth doesn't make you invisible. It merely drastically reduces the range at which the enemy can engage you--hopefully to less than the range that you can get him from. That's why even conventional aircraft (like the B-1, F-18E/F, Typhoon, etc.) incorporate some signature-reduction techniques. Hopefully, it lets you get close enough to the target that you can shoot without being fired back at, or at least reduces the time that you can get shot at.
Remember also that stealth worked very well back in 1991. Iraq had one of the most dense air defense networks in the world, especially around Baghdad, but not a single aircraft was lost. And while it may not be useful against low-tech enemies like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is always the possibility of a shooting war with China, Iran, a resurgent Russia, or some other, better-equipped force. It's better to have the capability and probably never need it, than to suddenly need it real bad and not have it.
You may want to check your numbers. A BMI under 15 would mean that I (at 6' 0") would have to weigh no more than 110lb. At a BMI of 11, that would put me at 81 lbs. I think that would qualify for severely underweight. According to the WHO (http://www.who.int/bmi/index.jsp?introPage=intro_ 3.html), underweight is defined as less than 18.5, and on Wikipedia, less than 15 means "near starvation."
I don't think BMI is accurate at all; I know a lot of people who are in the middle of the "overweight" category, yet are in great shape. Most of their weight is muscle.
I think he might be more upset at the "logic" some people use when discussing climate change. In many cases, it seems to run directly from "temperatures appear to be changing" to "change is bad, and man must be causing it, because we've only recorded the change after industrialization and/or nature never changes." There seems to be the underlying belief that the climate is naturally stable, and that humans are the only things that can cause it to change (never mind ice ages and all that...).
I'm not saying we should just chug along blindly and not do anything. Though I'm still not convinced that man is the primary force behind the current noticed changes (or even that these changes will continue long-term), I still support most environmental efforts--cutting emissions and such certainly can't harm the situation, and definately would help clean out the smong and all that. But I think those who put forth the above reasoning are shooting themselves in the proverbial foot; the more irrational your argument is, the less likely people are to take you seriously. And the attitude of "this is the Truth, and anything you say is Lies" without solid proof just makes it worse. It's no better than the crazy homeless guy on the corner with a sign saying "The end is near!" harassing pedestrians and telling them they're going to hell.
As part of my senior design project, I had to write a program that propagated Apophis's orbit from current state to 2029. The way you account for these second-order effects is to first run thousands of different cases, with small perturbations on the starting conditions (accounting for error in your knowledge of the asteroid's current position). Second, during the runs, you generate an error ellipse around the trajectory which accounts for possible perturbation effects. This error ellipse grows over time; imagine a slowly-widening cone wrapped up along the orbit. You can shrink this cone by taking measurements. The end result is that the error ellipse at any given point in the trajectory tells you where the asteroid will be to within a given confidence level; the size of the ellipse scales with desired confidence (since it's based on standard deviations and all that).
You can then continue further to 2036, find out which trajectories have error ellipses that intersect earth, then go back and plot their close approach points. That gives you the keyhole.
It's basically a bunch of statistics that I never quite understood. In fact, my program didn't quite do what it was supposed to--it calculated everything correctly (to the limits of matlab, anyways) and the results looked good, but the questions it answered were not exactly the ones we were supposed to solve. Given the then-current position estimate from JPL, my program showed that
(A) The asteroid would not hit earth in 2036, (B) At the end of our mission (in 2016) we would know Apophis's position in 2029 within a certain distance.
What we were supposed to was generate a bunch of fake trajectories that resulted in an impact in 2036. Using the starting positions for those trajectores, we were then supposed to show that our mission could predict the impact with 90% certainty.
Aside: Between this and the program that was supposed to calculate our transfer orbit, I spent something like twenty or thirty hours a week for three months, not counting my other duties in the project. I wasted three weeks debugging what turned out to be perfectly fine code because my starting position for Apophis was in a different reference frame than the rest of the program used. By the end, I was _dreaming_ in matlab.
No offense to all the programmers out there... but y'all must be masochists or something.
IIRC, the Roche limit only applies to bodies held together by gravitational self-attraction. There's a decent chance that Apophis is mechanically held together (say, a singlesolid rock or lump of metal). And really, momentum will be transferred regardless of whether it breaks up or not.
The axis of rotation. The magnetic poles on earth wander--I think the north one is currently somewhere in Canada. But the geographic poles of any body are the points where the axis of rotation penetrate the surface.
I'd say the best reason for separate accounts is not "in case of divorce," but rather to avoid money fights. I've seen too many people combine their accounts, then huge fights erupt because one person went out and bought new toys and didn't leave enough to pay the bills.
I'm getting married in October, and what we did for the finances was to set up three checking accounts and a joint savings, and our own credit cards. Each of us has our own checking account that the other one can't access, plus the joint account. The joint account pays for things like rent, food, gas, utilities, and other such things. The individual accounts are our own--the other person can't see them and has no right to examine them. They pay for things like clothing, nights out with friends, gadgets, books, etc. This way, if she spends all her money on clothes, it still won't affect whether the bills get paid or not, and we avoid fights over "well, I wanted to buy THIS but you bought THAT!" The credit cards work the same way.
Our philosophies on money are pretty different. However, this is an arrangement that both of us have agreed upon, and allows the bills to be paid, a decent amount saved/invested, and still gives us the freedom to spend on stuff within our means. And now she can't complain when I eventually go out and drop thousands at a time on airplane parts.
Re:It's the convenience, stupid
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 3, Interesting
But some people enjoy working on their homes, and like the satisfaction of getting done and knowing that they did it. And I know that if my choices were either:
A. work overtime so that I can pay someone to do it, or B. not work overtime and do it myself
I'd choose B. Working on a house is more interesting than sitting at a desk driving Catia all day, and (usually) the frustration level isn't any higher. It may take me longer overall, but I'd be at home with my family instead of at work.
"Throughout life, the more you question your own boundaries, the more fun you have." Doesn't matter. NOTHING is getting me to go skydiving; no sense jumping out of a perfectly good airplane that I could fly just fine.
The point is, if the car doesn't have the range just to get to or from work, it doesn't matter how efficient it is. You still don't get home in the evening.
"wipers and headlight controls should be the same on all cars. these are things you must be able to use whenever the weather changes while driving. the headlight controls on the turn signal stalk is pretty familiar at this point, and wiper controls on stalk on the right of the steering wheel is pretty common too, although what you do with the stalk to make the wipers work isn't always the same."
The other common one is headlight control mounted on the dash, and wipers on the left stalk. I think it's more common in cars that have a shifter on the column, as opposed to a "throttle" shifter (as I call it anyways, because it resembles an aircraft throttle), because then your right stalk is the shifter.
Front defroster is another matter entirely. I hate having to wait for the engine to warm up, heating the antifreeze/coolant, then using that to heat air to blow over my window. Seems terribly inefficient and can take several minutes to work. Why don't they put little electric heating elements in the defroster air duct (like a hairdryer) so you get nearly-instant hot air? Sure, it's a little more complexity, but worth it to me. Too bad we can't use engine bleed air like aircraft do...
I do agree that cruise control needs to be standardized. You can look at it and try to get familiar, but it's easy to forget after an hour of straight highway driving in an unfamiliar car.
Now if it were up to me, the wheel would be replaced with a yoke (with sidesticks for cruising), all cars would have cruise control, less-critical switches would be mounted on an overhead panel, all cars would have a HUD with imagery overlay (maps etc.), and the seat would shock you if you didn't use your turn signal or you sat at a green light.
"I'm not an expert on the rocket design, but others on this board have mentioned, that Saturn V is, pretty much, an ICBM (and this is the reason it sucked for manned flight)"
And your lack of expertise is showing. Saturn V was pretty much the first launch vehicle designed that WASN'T directly based on previous missile hardware. Previous launchers like the Soviet R-7 (Sputnik, and later developed into the Soyuz series), Redstone, Atlas, Titan, and Delta, were all direct conversions of military ballistic missiles. The Saturn I used Jupiter and Redstone tanks clustered in the first stage, with a new-design second stage, and was intended for satellite launching. The Saturn V came about as a direct requirement of the civilian moon program; it was designed for the express purpose of lifting manned vehicles. Its first and second stages were clean-sheet designs, and the third stage was an evolution of the original S-IV on the Saturn I.
The Saturn V, having been designed for manned payloads from the start, was obviously much better at that role than converted missiles. It flew smoother, placed less acceleration load on the crew, had engine-out capability, and a good abort system.
The Saturn V performed its job very well. Contrast that with its Soviet equivalent, the N1, which blew up on all four of its test launches. That's not to say that it was the ideal launcher for manned earth-orbit missions; it was rather overkill for that. It was also very good for large, heavy payloads (like entire space stations). And, as the shuttle eventually turned out, on a launch-by-launch basis, it would have been cheaper for us to just keep using the Saturn V for everything. Accounting for inflation, per-launch cost is roughly equivalent (IIRC), and costs for the Saturn V would have come down with mass production. We just threw all that capability away, however.
Yes, lessons learned from ballistic missile development applied to the Saturn V. And yes, if one was stupid enough to spend the money, they could use the Saturn V as an ICBM. You could do that with pretty much any launch vehicle, really; just change the trajectory and fit a guidance package to fine-tune it. But saying that the Saturn V was a sucky manned launcher because it was an ICBM is like saying the 747 is a bad airliner because it's really a bomber. Both used knowledge gained from previous military vehicles, and both could be kludged into a military role if you really, really wanted to. But they were expressly designed for civilian purposes, and are (were) very good at their jobs.
The fees, in many cases, are used to pay for things like cleanup, because a lot of people just don't know how to pick up their own trash. The fees also pay for lifeguards and beach patrol (if there are any), maintenance of structures (boardwalks, access bridges), and for replacing sand lost to erosion. It would be unreasonable to expect the residents to bear the entire cost, when the vast majority of it is incurred by visitors. The money has to come from somewhere, and it's only fair to charge the people who are using the beaches.
$20 does sound kinda steep, particularly if that's per person. Down here, Tybee and Hilton Head don't charge access to the beach itself, but they charge reasonable amounts for parking (about $1/hour at Tybee and $4/day at HH). I'd assume the revenues go to the things listed above.
Well, put the trucks around the things he'll want to attack (which are generally also the things you want to protect). Examples would include airbases, camps, ammo dumps, ports, bases, motor pools, etc.
The goal isn't "let's blow up every mortar he shoots for the sake of blowing it up;" rather, it's "let's keep whatever he fires from hitting important/valuable stuff, like people and expensive equipment."
Eh, you put the truck in position BEFORE the rounds are in the air. The rounds are probably in the air for no more than 30 seconds or so, so you have to be prepositioned and waiting.
"Actually, there is one Congressman who reads EVERY bill before he votes on it (along with his staffers). The minute they hit an unconstitutional part of the bill, he immediately decides to vote no. I believe he said he rarely has to get through 2-3 pages of any bill before his decision is made for him."
And who is this guy? I'd like him to move to my district...
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More efficient by what standards? Price? For just bringing up a couple of crewmembers, Soyuz probably is. But if your mission involves delivering lots of cargo, it might not be.
As of now, the shuttle is capable of a fully automatic landing--except for the part about lowering the landing gear. NASA came up with a rube goldberg-looking method to do that, involving running a couple cables to various places, loading a special flight software version, and sending a certain command at a given time (or something like that). I've read the entire procedure before on usenet; can't access it here at work though.
Nope. Starship Troopers was originally a book by Robert Heinlein. I suggest you read it; if you haven't seen the movie yet, just read the book and ignore the movie.
The movie was originally going to be called Bug Wars, or something like that. Part of the way through production, they discovered Heinlein's book, with a similar concept (space troopers vs. aliens), and adopted the name and some plot points. However, they completely bastardized and fucked over the book, which was partly written to explore the justification behind use of force. There was a fair bit of political commentary throughout (whether you agree with it or not is a different matter). The movie just shows the military/government in a light not much different from the Nazis, and has as much in common with the book as the I, Robot movie did with its namesake. Both are the equivalent of pissing on their respective author's grave.
Reportedly (haven't seen it myself, but I intend to) was the animated series Roughnecks. It follows Heinlein's idea a lot closer.
The real problem is that so many people sit there and say, "They shouldn't be allowed to do $thing". Nobody ever sits there and says, "Dammit, I shouldn't be allowed to do this!"
"there are plenty of areas in the desert SW that would allow for launches over uninhabited territories."
I doubt it. Remember, the boost phase is very long--the shuttle is somewhere up by Newfoundland (I think) by the end of the launch. Draw a line heading northeast or southeast from some point in the southwest, and you are definitely going to pass over populated areas. And the fuel savings would be negligible. Ice/foam problems wouldn't be helped; even desert air still has a good bit of water in it, and when cryogenics are involved, you're still going to get plenty of ice. The only benefit of a different launch site would be weather--Florida is the king of pop-up thunderstorms, and is a big fat bullseye for hurricanes.
Also remember that the boosters need somewhere to fall so they can be recovered.
There were plans to launch from Vandenburg, too, but that's also next to water.
It wasn't the fault of stealth not working. Current theories (at least from my rusty memory) for the reason the F-117 was shot down are as follows; it is likely that many (if not all) of them contributed:
1: Leadership dictated that strike aircraft follow the same flight paths in/out of the target area, night after night.
2: Enemy intelligence revealed some of the flight paths being used.
3: Stealth aircraft are vulnerable to radar detection when their weapons bays are open. The aircraft may have been detected momentarily. Also, it is possible that the doors didn't close all the way, or that there was some kind of flaw (screw sticking up, improperly sealed panel, etc) making the aircraft easier to detect.
4: The missile used to shoot the aircraft down was probably not using radar guidance. Many Soviet/Russian SAM systems incorporated a backup optical (manual command-guided) mode; this could have been used and there would have been no warning. Alternatively, the aircraft may not have been precisely targeted; a blind barrage of flak/missiles may have been shot up in the expected flight path, just hoping to hit something.
Current stealth technology does not make aircraft (or anything else) invisible to radar. It merely reduces the "signature," the amount of radar energy reflected back to the receiver, with the expectation that said receiver will either filter it out as noise, or not be sensitive enough to detect it at all.
I know you've probably heard about the "stealth-detecting radar" and the cell-phone-tower technique. It is true that there are ways to detect stealh aircraft using radar systems, but those methods generally either require massive computational power, or use such low frequencies that the aircraft is detected, but you can't locate it very precisely. After some observation, you could probably get a rough idea of heading and speed, but nothing even remotely close to useable for weapons targeting. That requires use of higher-frequency setups, which the stealth tech is more effective against. Even then, a high-frequency radar could detect stealth aircraft (say, at 1 mile as opposed to 100mi with conventional aircraft), but you need insanely high power to do so at longer ranges, and you won't find that kind of power on most fire-control radars.
Again, stealth doesn't make you invisible. It merely drastically reduces the range at which the enemy can engage you--hopefully to less than the range that you can get him from. That's why even conventional aircraft (like the B-1, F-18E/F, Typhoon, etc.) incorporate some signature-reduction techniques. Hopefully, it lets you get close enough to the target that you can shoot without being fired back at, or at least reduces the time that you can get shot at.
Remember also that stealth worked very well back in 1991. Iraq had one of the most dense air defense networks in the world, especially around Baghdad, but not a single aircraft was lost. And while it may not be useful against low-tech enemies like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is always the possibility of a shooting war with China, Iran, a resurgent Russia, or some other, better-equipped force. It's better to have the capability and probably never need it, than to suddenly need it real bad and not have it.
You may want to check your numbers. A BMI under 15 would mean that I (at 6' 0") would have to weigh no more than 110lb. At a BMI of 11, that would put me at 81 lbs. I think that would qualify for severely underweight. According to the WHO (http://www.who.int/bmi/index.jsp?introPage=intro_ 3.html), underweight is defined as less than 18.5, and on Wikipedia, less than 15 means "near starvation."
I don't think BMI is accurate at all; I know a lot of people who are in the middle of the "overweight" category, yet are in great shape. Most of their weight is muscle.
I think he might be more upset at the "logic" some people use when discussing climate change. In many cases, it seems to run directly from "temperatures appear to be changing" to "change is bad, and man must be causing it, because we've only recorded the change after industrialization and/or nature never changes." There seems to be the underlying belief that the climate is naturally stable, and that humans are the only things that can cause it to change (never mind ice ages and all that...).
I'm not saying we should just chug along blindly and not do anything. Though I'm still not convinced that man is the primary force behind the current noticed changes (or even that these changes will continue long-term), I still support most environmental efforts--cutting emissions and such certainly can't harm the situation, and definately would help clean out the smong and all that. But I think those who put forth the above reasoning are shooting themselves in the proverbial foot; the more irrational your argument is, the less likely people are to take you seriously. And the attitude of "this is the Truth, and anything you say is Lies" without solid proof just makes it worse. It's no better than the crazy homeless guy on the corner with a sign saying "The end is near!" harassing pedestrians and telling them they're going to hell.
As part of my senior design project, I had to write a program that propagated Apophis's orbit from current state to 2029. The way you account for these second-order effects is to first run thousands of different cases, with small perturbations on the starting conditions (accounting for error in your knowledge of the asteroid's current position). Second, during the runs, you generate an error ellipse around the trajectory which accounts for possible perturbation effects. This error ellipse grows over time; imagine a slowly-widening cone wrapped up along the orbit. You can shrink this cone by taking measurements. The end result is that the error ellipse at any given point in the trajectory tells you where the asteroid will be to within a given confidence level; the size of the ellipse scales with desired confidence (since it's based on standard deviations and all that).
You can then continue further to 2036, find out which trajectories have error ellipses that intersect earth, then go back and plot their close approach points. That gives you the keyhole.
It's basically a bunch of statistics that I never quite understood. In fact, my program didn't quite do what it was supposed to--it calculated everything correctly (to the limits of matlab, anyways) and the results looked good, but the questions it answered were not exactly the ones we were supposed to solve. Given the then-current position estimate from JPL, my program showed that
(A) The asteroid would not hit earth in 2036,
(B) At the end of our mission (in 2016) we would know Apophis's position in 2029 within a certain distance.
What we were supposed to was generate a bunch of fake trajectories that resulted in an impact in 2036. Using the starting positions for those trajectores, we were then supposed to show that our mission could predict the impact with 90% certainty.
Aside: Between this and the program that was supposed to calculate our transfer orbit, I spent something like twenty or thirty hours a week for three months, not counting my other duties in the project. I wasted three weeks debugging what turned out to be perfectly fine code because my starting position for Apophis was in a different reference frame than the rest of the program used. By the end, I was _dreaming_ in matlab.
No offense to all the programmers out there... but y'all must be masochists or something.
IIRC, the Roche limit only applies to bodies held together by gravitational self-attraction. There's a decent chance that Apophis is mechanically held together (say, a singlesolid rock or lump of metal). And really, momentum will be transferred regardless of whether it breaks up or not.
The axis of rotation. The magnetic poles on earth wander--I think the north one is currently somewhere in Canada. But the geographic poles of any body are the points where the axis of rotation penetrate the surface.
I'd say the best reason for separate accounts is not "in case of divorce," but rather to avoid money fights. I've seen too many people combine their accounts, then huge fights erupt because one person went out and bought new toys and didn't leave enough to pay the bills.
I'm getting married in October, and what we did for the finances was to set up three checking accounts and a joint savings, and our own credit cards. Each of us has our own checking account that the other one can't access, plus the joint account. The joint account pays for things like rent, food, gas, utilities, and other such things. The individual accounts are our own--the other person can't see them and has no right to examine them. They pay for things like clothing, nights out with friends, gadgets, books, etc. This way, if she spends all her money on clothes, it still won't affect whether the bills get paid or not, and we avoid fights over "well, I wanted to buy THIS but you bought THAT!" The credit cards work the same way.
Our philosophies on money are pretty different. However, this is an arrangement that both of us have agreed upon, and allows the bills to be paid, a decent amount saved/invested, and still gives us the freedom to spend on stuff within our means. And now she can't complain when I eventually go out and drop thousands at a time on airplane parts.
But some people enjoy working on their homes, and like the satisfaction of getting done and knowing that they did it. And I know that if my choices were either:
A. work overtime so that I can pay someone to do it, or
B. not work overtime and do it myself
I'd choose B. Working on a house is more interesting than sitting at a desk driving Catia all day, and (usually) the frustration level isn't any higher. It may take me longer overall, but I'd be at home with my family instead of at work.
"Throughout life, the more you question your own boundaries, the more fun you have." Doesn't matter. NOTHING is getting me to go skydiving; no sense jumping out of a perfectly good airplane that I could fly just fine.
It's the old joke:
What do sex and air have in common?
Both of them are no big deal until you aren't getting any...
The point is, if the car doesn't have the range just to get to or from work, it doesn't matter how efficient it is. You still don't get home in the evening.
"wipers and headlight controls should be the same on all cars. these are things you must be able to use whenever the weather changes while driving. the headlight controls on the turn signal stalk is pretty familiar at this point, and wiper controls on stalk on the right of the steering wheel is pretty common too, although what you do with the stalk to make the wipers work isn't always the same."
The other common one is headlight control mounted on the dash, and wipers on the left stalk. I think it's more common in cars that have a shifter on the column, as opposed to a "throttle" shifter (as I call it anyways, because it resembles an aircraft throttle), because then your right stalk is the shifter.
Front defroster is another matter entirely. I hate having to wait for the engine to warm up, heating the antifreeze/coolant, then using that to heat air to blow over my window. Seems terribly inefficient and can take several minutes to work. Why don't they put little electric heating elements in the defroster air duct (like a hairdryer) so you get nearly-instant hot air? Sure, it's a little more complexity, but worth it to me. Too bad we can't use engine bleed air like aircraft do...
I do agree that cruise control needs to be standardized. You can look at it and try to get familiar, but it's easy to forget after an hour of straight highway driving in an unfamiliar car.
Now if it were up to me, the wheel would be replaced with a yoke (with sidesticks for cruising), all cars would have cruise control, less-critical switches would be mounted on an overhead panel, all cars would have a HUD with imagery overlay (maps etc.), and the seat would shock you if you didn't use your turn signal or you sat at a green light.
"I'm not an expert on the rocket design, but others on this board have mentioned, that Saturn V is, pretty much, an ICBM (and this is the reason it sucked for manned flight)"
And your lack of expertise is showing. Saturn V was pretty much the first launch vehicle designed that WASN'T directly based on previous missile hardware. Previous launchers like the Soviet R-7 (Sputnik, and later developed into the Soyuz series), Redstone, Atlas, Titan, and Delta, were all direct conversions of military ballistic missiles. The Saturn I used Jupiter and Redstone tanks clustered in the first stage, with a new-design second stage, and was intended for satellite launching. The Saturn V came about as a direct requirement of the civilian moon program; it was designed for the express purpose of lifting manned vehicles. Its first and second stages were clean-sheet designs, and the third stage was an evolution of the original S-IV on the Saturn I.
The Saturn V, having been designed for manned payloads from the start, was obviously much better at that role than converted missiles. It flew smoother, placed less acceleration load on the crew, had engine-out capability, and a good abort system.
The Saturn V performed its job very well. Contrast that with its Soviet equivalent, the N1, which blew up on all four of its test launches. That's not to say that it was the ideal launcher for manned earth-orbit missions; it was rather overkill for that. It was also very good for large, heavy payloads (like entire space stations). And, as the shuttle eventually turned out, on a launch-by-launch basis, it would have been cheaper for us to just keep using the Saturn V for everything. Accounting for inflation, per-launch cost is roughly equivalent (IIRC), and costs for the Saturn V would have come down with mass production. We just threw all that capability away, however.
Yes, lessons learned from ballistic missile development applied to the Saturn V. And yes, if one was stupid enough to spend the money, they could use the Saturn V as an ICBM. You could do that with pretty much any launch vehicle, really; just change the trajectory and fit a guidance package to fine-tune it. But saying that the Saturn V was a sucky manned launcher because it was an ICBM is like saying the 747 is a bad airliner because it's really a bomber. Both used knowledge gained from previous military vehicles, and both could be kludged into a military role if you really, really wanted to. But they were expressly designed for civilian purposes, and are (were) very good at their jobs.
You mean instead of corn syrup...
The fees, in many cases, are used to pay for things like cleanup, because a lot of people just don't know how to pick up their own trash. The fees also pay for lifeguards and beach patrol (if there are any), maintenance of structures (boardwalks, access bridges), and for replacing sand lost to erosion. It would be unreasonable to expect the residents to bear the entire cost, when the vast majority of it is incurred by visitors. The money has to come from somewhere, and it's only fair to charge the people who are using the beaches.
$20 does sound kinda steep, particularly if that's per person. Down here, Tybee and Hilton Head don't charge access to the beach itself, but they charge reasonable amounts for parking (about $1/hour at Tybee and $4/day at HH). I'd assume the revenues go to the things listed above.
How can deaf people make use of an mp3 player?
How can people with no arms play x-box?
How can quadrapalegics ride bicycles?
Well, put the trucks around the things he'll want to attack (which are generally also the things you want to protect). Examples would include airbases, camps, ammo dumps, ports, bases, motor pools, etc.
The goal isn't "let's blow up every mortar he shoots for the sake of blowing it up;" rather, it's "let's keep whatever he fires from hitting important/valuable stuff, like people and expensive equipment."
Eh, you put the truck in position BEFORE the rounds are in the air. The rounds are probably in the air for no more than 30 seconds or so, so you have to be prepositioned and waiting.
"Actually, there is one Congressman who reads EVERY bill before he votes on it (along with his staffers). The minute they hit an unconstitutional part of the bill, he immediately decides to vote no. I believe he said he rarely has to get through 2-3 pages of any bill before his decision is made for him."
And who is this guy? I'd like him to move to my district...
"They don't need to know my checking account number." You realize they can just read it off the check, right?