Nearly every businessman-type hotel I've stayed at in Japan had wired Ethernet for in-room Internet connection at no extra charge. A few had spectacularly crappy dropout-prone slow Wifi with insecure WEP keys etc. The crowning glory was the hotel which gave me a WPA key that didn't work until I realised Japanese folks didn't understand there was a difference between "hotelxxx" and "Hotelxxx".
Re: I'm wondering if it's time for a return of the "ring wing"
Ah yes, the ring wing. It was further developed into the SSZ concept aka the Super Sonic Zeppelin. Fit a shockwave-trapping ring wing around a lighter-than-air dirigible which provides the lift and it can go supersonic without those discomfiting bangy noises. Drag is someone else's problem.
I've run my Dell u2711 at full resolution (2560x1440 same as the Apple display) via its HDMI connection from a ratty old AGP video card. The HDMI standard has been improved over the last few iterations and in the current version, V1.4, it can even cope with resolutions up to the 4096 x 2160 home-cinema format being pushed by Toshiba among others.
As someone else mentioned earlier the Dell 27" display is the u2711 model, still available from Dell. There are suppliers who will sell you an open-box zero-defective-pixel Dell return model for under 500 quid delivered in the UK. The IPS panel in the Dell is exactly the same as the one Apple use, a Philips product if I understand correctly with the drive electronics and backlight differing.
I'm sitting in front of just such an open-box Dell u2711 display as I type this; it has two DVI-D ports, an HDMI port, a DisplayPort (HDMI with an Apple-specific connector so they don't have to pay licence fees apparently), a VGA port for old-skool types and even a couple of analogue ports if you've got some ancient video kit (like my laserdisc player) that can't talk proper digital. It also has a 4-port USB2.0 hub built-in plus an SD-card reader on the side of the frame.
The Dell's chassis can be bolted to a VESA mount if specialist fitting is required (wall mount or swivel-stand) unlike the Apple display although you can buy a VESA adaptor from Apple for about thirty quid extra.
Producing odd radioisotopes like Pu-238 or some of the ones used in medical treatments etc. requires specific amounts and energy levels of neutron flux, not something regular power reactors can produce. These isotopes are typically made in research reactors or specialist reactors dedicated to the task. A lot of the reactors in the West doing this sort of work have been shut down over the decades as they age or their operating regulations are tightened up underneath them. There's a shortage of medical isotope production on the horizon with only a couple of reactors left on-line in the West to make them, especially the short-lived stuff that needs continuous production to keep the demand satisfied. One of these reactors could be repurposed to make more Pu-238 but it couldn't make medical isotopes at the same time.
The Soviets^Russians have several isotope production reactors on-stream -- see the kerfuffle about the journalist poisoned by radioactive polonium a few years back -- but they don't have the sort of tight regs the West's production facilities labour under or indeed the requirement to make a profit.
The US does have some Pu-238 on hand but it is committed to black-budget DoD operations, for powering stealthy spy satellites that don't need a big array of solar panels to operate as well as deep-sea submarine listening stations to track shipping and sub movements around the world. This is the real reason the Russians stopped supplying the US with Pu-238 as despite promises the material they provided wouldn't be used for military purposes the US simply reallocated their "civilian" stockpile of Pu-238 to their military projects since Pu-238 like most other energy materials is fungible.
I have this vision of a team of camouflage-wearing crack MCPs breaking into suffering Linux users homes in the dead of night, installing Win7 on their terminally-broken Ubuntu machines and then disappearing into the darkness leaving behind functional computers and a card reading "Windows, it just works" propped up on the keyboard.
Intel are trying to stack die-on-die, not package-on-package which has been done for yonks -- My old Atari ST 520 got a RAM upgrade that way with sixteen DIL chips stacked on the existing RAM chips and some legs-in-the-air (Oooh, Missus!) wiring to cope with the extra address line.
The RasperryPi chips are low-power and low-speed -- Intel want to stack DRAM dies with a couple of microns separation on top of a CPU putting out 40 watts of heat and more. I think they'll have to come up with some kind of nanoengineered active cooling system to get the heat away from the silicon at a great enough rate to prevent meltdowns or thermal noise problems at high data speeds.
To properly test this rocket motor you need to cool it and subject it to an air pressure drop over the same sort of timescale that you expect the balloon launch to altitude to take rather than doing it over an arbitrary curve.
Cooling it down from ground temp (10 to 20C) to firing altitude air temp (-60C) could probably be done following a specific temperature vs. time profile by using a sealed jacket around the motor with a few mm separation between it and the inner wall of the jacket. Blow dried (to prevent ice formation from humid air) compressed air through a coil in an insulated box filled with dry ice pellets and into the jacket, adjusting the cooling flow rate to match the simulated launch to altitude temperature profile by monitoring a temperature gauge on or in the rocket body.
For the vacuum part of the test use a vacuum pump to exhaust a remote tank, don't connect the pump directly to the test chamber. A simple hand-valve connected between the tank and the test chamber and an eye on a pressure gauge monitoring the motor test chamber should allow the experimenter to control the decreasing pressure over a time curve which will be close to expected conditions. Right now the setup as specified will freeze the motor quickly in the presence of moist air at 1 bar before the air pressure drops and the moisture disappears for all intents and purposes.
A regular air compressor tank of 50 to 100 litres capacity should easily be enough to act as a vacuum tank. They're built for 6-8 bar operation and tested to beyond 10 bar so they will cope with 1 bar of "crush" without a problem. Do remember that the vacuum hose has to be quite thick-walled otherwise it will crush flat under vacuum but there is flexible plastic hose on the market that will do the job. Keeping the hoses short also helps as they also have to be pumped out as the system runs.
Using a tank also means you don't need a hefty vacuum pump as you can pump the tank down overnight, say, before you carry out the experiment. As someone else said a hard shutoff valve in the line between the test chamber and the tank is a good idea. A couple of poppet valves in the chamber lid is also recommended just in case the pop-off lid doesn't, err, pop off.
"you have to dismount and replace the entire barrel/magazine unit to reload"
The video I saw showed no need to dismount and remount the MS launcher from the M-16, just open the rear of the breech and feed three rounds in then close it up again. It's possible you saw or were told about an earlier version which did require a dismount and remount.
"not often you need to hose an area with grenades" -- I can think of several situations where that would be useful, such as deploying smoke grenades to cover an area in front of your position. The MS launcher is a "semi-auto" system requiring a pull of the trigger for each grenade launched, it's not full-auto always firing all three rounds when used.
"Lastly, what do you do with the unit if you've only needed one grenade? " If you've got time and cover you can replace the used round by adding another to the stack in the breech. Your quibble is a bit like saying it's too difficult to keep track of how many rounds in a rifle's magazine have been expended.
I am reminded of the anecdotal quotes by retired majors over the centuries about the introduction of bolt-action/magazine-fed/self-loading rifles that they would lead to the undermining of a soldier's essential skills because they were too easy to use and wasteful of ammunition to boot.
Do you have any spare Pu-238 kicking around? Down the side of the couch perhaps, or out in the shed behind the lawnmower?
The US doesn't have a lot of Pu-238 left, and most if not all of that is now committed to their spook satellite and submarine RTG military projects. The last lot of civvie-street Pu-238 they had left is sticking out of the back of the Curiosity Mars rover as solar cells weren't considered sufficient to keep it alive and operational through a Mars winter, never mind the much larger power consumption of this vehicle compared to the previous rovers.
The scientific research reactors that made Pu-238 in the past have all been shut down or reworked to make medical radio-isotopes. The Soviets have some Pu-238 kicking around from their own scientific reactor programmes and they were selling it to the Yanks under a "civilian-use-only" licence then they discovered that the US DoD was comandeering the existing stocks of home-grown Pu-238 with the excuse that the civilians could use the Russian Pu-238 instead. This did not go down well in Moscow for some reason.
There's somewhat amateurish video on Youtube of the MS three-round underbarrel launcher in action. Three rounds in three seconds (it kicks a bit when fired and the weapon has to be brought down onto target again). The regular M203 is a lot slower to feed than that. Reloading three separate rounds into the MS takes longer than a single-round reload in the M203 (see the end of Scarface for a movie treatment of the process) but I'd estimate it's about the same time on a round per round basis.
Cons: the MS unit is bigger and heavier than the M203, I suspect the range of ammo types (smoke, fragmentation etc) available are limited and probably more expensive than the conventional M203 cartridge, the effective launch range may be reduced, it may be more fragile and less squaddie-proof than the M203 and it is almost certainly a lot more expensive.
The plus for Metal Storm tech in anti-personnel weaponry is the capacity and simplicity of the weapon rather than its super-fast rate of fire -- the million-rounds-a-minute deal was an anti-missile system, not meant to be man-portable.
The M203 underbarrel grenade launcher currently available for the M16 rifle is a single-shot item; it has to be opened and manually reloaded after every shot. The Metal Storm grenade launcher could fire three rounds from a device about the same size as the M203 without the rifleman having to stop and reload every time. Adding an autoloader and magazine feed for 40mm grenade shells would make the M203 very heavy and bulky and it would also be prone to jamming etc. Sadly for the Metal Storm shareholders, making their device squaddie-proof and getting paid for making them has so far eluded their engineers and salesmen.
Why would swinging a nuclear power plant's output put much thermomechanical stress on the core and vessel structures? The temperatures stay very much the same, it's the heat energy output that's reduced so the amount of coolant (which is also the moderator, one factor that makes this operation non-trivial) flow is reduced. This means a smaller amount of secondary-loop steam is generated hence less torque at the generator turbine blades and less electromotive power in the generator set. It's not optimally efficient and it helps if the genset and secondary loop systems are built from the outset to cope with variable output, not an option in older existing designs.
There are other problems such as neutron poisoning when swinging a reactor's output but I don't know the details of how the French are able to deal with those particular issues.
As for replacing the sparkly bits, the new EP-1000 design is actually capable of allowing this to be done. The reactor building is constructed before the reactor vessel itself is installed rather than the usual technique of building the structure and containment around the vessel in-situ. In the case of a fault developing or the vessel wearing out it could be removed and replaced without knocking down the building to get at it. This capability is really there to allow for cheaper end-of-life decommissioning of the reactor rather than allowing running repairs though.
At the time I'm writing this (late evening 16th June) we're taking 800MW from the French pool according to your link. It swings through the day but as I understand it most of the time the link feeds power to us from the French side. Wintertime might have a higher load on the link for us rather than this period of near-arctic long summer daylight with lower demand peaks.
The French nuclear operators have worked out how to modify the output of their modern nuclear plants to allow for reduced demand; last reports I saw said they could swing the output of some stations between 70% and 100% in 30 minutes at the cost of fuel burning efficiency -- given the low cost of nuclear fuel that is less of a consideration than a carbon-burning station.
With more of their neighbours such as Spain and Germany commmitting themselves to being dependent on renewables the French may not need to do this much as they will be able to sell excess nuclear baseload across their borders to prevent brownouts and blackouts in such countries. As an aside, Britain has been buying about 2GW of French nuclear power pretty much continuously since a cross-Channel HV DC power connector was installed back in the 90s.
Germany is commissioning 6GW of new coal-burning power stations this year, with more to come. They've got hundreds of years of surface-mined brown coal they can dig up and burn to supplement their renewables. It's filthy, polluting and extracting it destroys the countryside but it's cheap and nobody cares enough to put a stop to it they way they do about nuclear power.
Some people were injured in the reactor building explosions but several people died when the actual tsunami hit the plant and a crane operator at the other Fukushima plant (Daini) died as well. As for the three workers with radiation burns on the feet and legs, the news that they were released from hospital after four days was not as prominently reported as the original event probably because "Men perfectly OK after scary radiation incident" doesn't grab the headlines.
OTOH there is new information coming out on tests being carried out on the Fukushima first-responder workers suggests that some of them ingested or inhaled significant amounts of radioactive material during the first few days of the incident, enough to put several of them over the 250mSv annual dose limit in a few days working on the site. The small amount of information released suggests the medical authorities don't think the men's health is seriously at risk from their exposure (no cases of radiation poisoning mentioned) but it shouldn't have happened at all.
I saw the proposal to flood the primary containment of one or more of the reactors on a Japanese news website. My worry about doing something like that would be the effects of the extra mass in the reactor building if another major earthquake came along, with several hundred extra tonnes of water sloshing around and damaging the pressure vessel support structures and even the secondary containment.
I think the idea of flooding was to passively cool the cores by circulation and conduction through the water to the much larger surface of the primary containment vessel. This might effectively bring the whole thing to cold shutdown without requiring actively circulating water to remove decay heat as they are doing to Daiichi reactors 5 and 6 at the moment as well as the Daini, Tokai and Onagawa plant reactors.
Starship Troopers was actually made as a six-part Japanese anime series back in the late 80s. It is more faithful to the book than the movie version made later. You can perhaps find copies of it floating in the piratical seas of the Internet if you look hard, and there are rumours of a fansubbed version I understand. You can't miss it, Juan Rico has green hair.
by James H. Schmitz. It's a short novel, which makes it easier to turn into a 90-minute movie. The action is suspenseful and keeps moving plus there's a chance for some good acting as Nile Etland takes on the role of Tuvela in-story. Having giant hunting otters as sidekicks is a cherry on the top (Spiff and Sweeting for the win!) Cameron could recycle a lot of the CGI forestry work he put into Avatar to make the floatwood islands which are the background for the action.
If you don't know the story you'll find it in Baen's Free Library for legal download, in the collection "The Hub -- Dangerous Territory" edited by Eric Flint. Recommended.
If there was any amount of moderated fission going on in the pool then the Bequerel count ratio of iodine to cesium would be massive as iodine-131 is much more active than either of the cesium isotopes, and Bequerel levels are tied in to activity. What those numbers show is that most of the iodine has died away because of its short half-life. There's still a lot of it in the sample because there was a massive amount (atomically speaking) to start with in the spent fuel rods. If any substantial amount of fission was going on in the pool then the amount of iodine-131 leaking out of the damaged fuel rods would result in counts in the kilo- or even mega-bequerel level per cubic centimetre.
The fission the report refers to happened months ago when about half of the rods now in the pool were in the operating reactor core which was defuelled in November last year. The other half of the rods are from the last time this reactor was defuelled, probably three years or so ago. Those older rods were probably scheduled to be removed to the off-reactor common pool storage or prepped for dry-cask storage when the tsunami hit.
After the expected snowfall, his hand burned when he wiped some water off the plastic sheeting but soap and water dealt with the contamination and he's now wearing rubber gloves when handling the polluted water.
He lives in northern Arizona. In the USA.
If anything Lewis is understating the amount of crazy stupid that is running around screaming "The world is ending! The world is ending!"
"Dai" in this case is a counter, like "number" so Daiichi is "number 1", the same as a popular businessman hotel chain in Japan which is probably getting fewer bookings these days for some reason. Since the Japs do like operator overloading in their language "dai" also means "big" although the kanji character for "big" is different to the one for "number".
A dam forming a water reservoir failed during the recent earthquake up in the hills behind Fukushima. The resulting flood killed at least four people and at last reports another few folks were missing from the washed-out houses devastated by the wall of water, but since it wasn't radioactivity from damaged reactors that killed these people, just benign and safe H2O from a renewable resource this particular lethal disaster hasn't been big news on the world stage. Then again death and destruction from dam failures is so common it's rarely worth commenting on unless the number of people killed gets into the thousands.
There already are a bunch of reactors stitched along the NW coast of Honshu on the Sea of Japan coast, facing Russia. Some of them were taken out of commission by, guess what, an earthquake in 2007. As for why they built reactor plants at Fukushima facing a giant subduction zone out in the Pacific, when they planned them back in the 1960s the idea of plate tectonics was just gaining legitimacy and nobody had mapped the crustal plates and understood that the coast there was prone to rare very powerful offshore earthquakes and tsunamis -- everywhere in Japan gets earthquakes after all. There was also a bit of local/national politics, vote-buying and pork-barreling going on, Japan same old same old.
The Fukushima Daini (number 2) reactor plant is only a few kilometres south of the Daiichi (number 1, gotta give the Japanese full marks for imaginative labelling of things...) and it rode out the tsunami OK with all four reactors there shutting down almost without incident. The three reactors further south at Okagawa ditto and even the last remaining reactor in commission at Tokai Daini shut down properly and safely too.
A good article with some real numbers about the power station shutdowns in Japan and an explanation of Japan's two separate national grids which prevents load sharing to any great extent can be found here.
Another 10,000 old folks could die of heatstroke due to the reduced amount of power available for air conditioning in the big cities during the summer and autumn.
Plutonium is not that toxic, compared to arsenic (an incredibly toxic metal pumped out into the surrounding countryside in tonne quantities by coal-fired power stations) or beryllium (cumulative, doesn't chelate, wrecks the immune system, no cure). People known to have being contaminated by plutonium, usually by inhalation of oxide dust particles, in the US nuclear weapons development programme in the 1940s and 1950s were tracked and monitored closely afterwards. I've seen a report that of ten such individuals four or five were still alive fifty years later. Only one of the sample clade had died of the effects of cancer, the rest from assorted diseases common in old age.
Radiotoxicity for Pu is low to medium, an alpha emitter with half-life of over 10,000 years for the two common isotopes (239 and 240) found in fuel rods. It's definitely not good news in large amounts in tissue but there is a lot worse in the nuclear zoo biologically speaking -- polonium-208, cobalt-60, cesium-137...
These are Boiling Water Reactors (BWR) -- water is sprayed onto the core in the reactor vessel to produce steam that then drives turbine-generator sets to produce electricity. That water is in a closed loop, in part because it is treated to remove dissolved oxygen, minerals etc. It is very pure water to prevent corrosion, buildups of deposits etc. in the pipes as well as preventing radioactive "daughter" isotopes since it is 99.99% hydrogen and oxygen. As a matter of interest the same sort of clean water is used in coal and oil-fired power stations that use boilers -- the deoxygenated water/steam reduces cumulative damage to the pipes and the blades of the turbines.
After the steam comes out of the turbines it goes into external condenser units which are cooled by seawater pumped up from the shore. The steam turns back into water and is returned to the reactor for another go-through. They don't have any more deionised water to hand or they can't pump it into the reactor fast enough so they're going to use seawater which they have plenty of close to hand. They have accepted the reactors are never going to run again, much like triggering the fire extinguishing systems in a data centre means a nice future bonus for the area's server hardware sales guy.
The Consumer Reports people did treat the iPhone fairly. They tested it properly instead of relying on one-off anecdotal reports and found, not surprisingly that skin contact with the bare antenna detuned the radio TX/RX subsystem in the phone, reducing its ability to maintain a connection in low signal strength areas and also increasing battery power drain into the bargain. No-one else designing phones or any sort of mobile radio system makes an antenna where the conducting element can be touched or shorted out for this reason. Holding the phone does tend to screen the antenna somewhat but does not detune it the way direct electrical contact does.
The radio engineers at Apple were overriden by the case designers who wanted a Shiny! eyecatch strip of metal around the edge of the case. Even a thin layer of plastic or rubber over the antenna surface to keep fingers off would have prevented this screwup but that wasn't to be.
Prediction: the iPhone 5 and successors will NOT have a bare antenna that can be touched by fingers.
It was originally intended that the ISS was going to be "decommissioned" into the upper atmosphere in 2016 or so. The owners might extend its lifespan to 2020 but that's debatable and very dependent on funding. So where are these future manned launches going to go to? A replacement for the ISS isn't even a paper exercise at the moment let alone a fundable project, and like the Moonshot it's been done and there's no real point in doing it twice. Spam-in-a-can in orbit has been done and we don't really need to do that any more just to be doing it.
There's the Bigelow space-hotel balloons which have still not been tested for habitability and survivability, maybe a Mir 3 based on Progress modules by the Soviets, sorry Russians and that's it, basically. Any future Moonshot or manned Mars missions will involve new-design Big Dumb Boosters like the Ares V with a small manned-launch component but the days of lots of humans (i.e. more than ten at a time) in LEO is coming to an end with the Shuttle being retired and until someone finds a good reason for there to be lot of humans in space and is willing to pay for it then manned spaceflight is going to be quite rare after this decade is out.
There are other factors in man-rating such as the acceleration profile of the flight. Hardware can be built to take 5-G plus for long periods during launch whereas meatbags don't work right in such conditions. Apollo and the Shuttle topped out at about 3G in flight as I recall. There's also vibration and sheer noise levels which can be too much for yoomans but which don't affect hardware in the same way.
Man-rating Ariane would cost money and would provide a native European human spaceflight capability assuming the funding and development of a home-grown capsule which would also cost money (and probably be over budget). At that point the world would have yet another man-rated launch system elbowing its way into a tiny launch market which has no real commercial return and which is already filled by the Soyuz system. After the Shuttles go to various museums the SpaceX Dragon or similar plus (maybe) the Ares 1 will fill in the US side of things or they'll simply buy seats from the Soviets, sorry Russians too.
ESA have paper designs for a re-entry capsule built on the ATV 'bus' but that will cost money to design, build and fly and ESA's budget is pretty much tapped out with the existing Ariane flights for the next three ATVs including Kepler and their part of the Galileo project. There's also the Vega small scientific launcher AKA Berlusconi's Bottle Rocket which should fly for the first time this year as well as the new Soyuz launch facility being built in New Guinea to provide commercial Progress launches, all of which are costing more than planned (of course).
If Europe really wanted to get a man into space then using the new Soyuz launchpad would probably be best with a proven man-rated booster and capsule combo bought off-the-shelf from the Soviets, sorry, Russians rather than trying to man-rate the Ariane and design a capsule version of the ATV in another round of reinvent-the-wheel.
The Hi-power was designed in the 1920s in competition with a range of other light 9mm self-loading pistols coming from other manufacturers, adding features as a double-action trigger and John Moses Browning was long dead by the time its design was finalised.
As for defensive/offensive use of handguns the limitations tend to be on physical size and weight for everyday carry. The 1911 is large and heavy for a handgun but its smaller brother, the Colt Commander is within the boundaries for civilian carry and is likewise chambered for the .45ACP round. There are of course a whole range of other calibres the 1911 design has been modified to take, down to .22LR. I don't know the biggest round the Hi-power and derivatives can cope with but most DA double-stack semi-auto designs tend to top out at .40S&W.
The Browning Hi-Power is a double-action 9mm pistol with a double-stack magazine, no grip safety and a different blowback system to the single-action M1911 45ACP single-stack magazine with a grip safety and its famous swivelling-link blowback system. They're two different designs, trading reliability and bullet size in the 1911 for greater magazine capacity and higher accuracy in the Hi-Power.
The few problems with the original Browning M1911 design were fixed by Colt who mass-produced it for the US military as the 1911A1.
The real "trench broom" in WWI was the 1897 Winchester pump-action shotgun, complete in military fitout with a bayonet lug. I heard of a collector using one a while back in a clay-pigeon shoot, blasting away at the clays with the original-issue 18-inch long sword bayonet in place.
Just thinking that one of these unmanned vessels would be classed under international maritime laws as an abandoned vessel and hence ripe for salvage by anyone who could put a crew aboard and take it over. At that point either it could be sold to the highest bidder or the original owners (the US government in this case) would have to buy it back at a price set by the appropriate Receiver of Wreck officials. Step and repeat...
"Because the iPad battery should last a good deal longer than three years."
The iPad has a regular Lithium-tech battery from the same el-cheapo produciton lines everybody else gets their cells from and they start to degrade pretty much the day they are made. The iPad's battery not going to last much longer than the folio battery will.
"take it in and buy a new iPad or new battery. Chances are buyers will want the former anyway."
The future iPad will not be backwards compatible with the old iPad so this folio/kbd unit will not work with it anyway.
The people who wanted to buy the EV-1 cars they were leasing wanted to drive them, not put them in museums. Under US law that would mean GM had a legal obligation to supply spare parts for ten years after they were sold and provide maintenance facilities to keep the cars in safe working order. The cars cost over half a million dollars each as it was (a small production run of very non-standard vehicles) and the ongoing costs of selling the cars would not be met by the money the owners would pay for such services. The experiment produced some data on electric car operation, mostly showing how difficult it was going to be to have EVs in widespread use. Once the experiment was over GM's liability ended when the EV-1s were scrapped which is WHY they were scrapped.
Switching signals involves converting electrical energy into heat. Compact switch layouts have less area to dissipate the same amounts of heat. 3D structures have even more problems getting the heat away from the switches. Two ways around this are to use less energy per switch transition (which raises other problems in itself such as thermal and electrical noise swamping the signal) and the other is to use materials and switch technologies that don't degrade when hot (which causes knockon problems with packaging and assembly technologies -- a ceramic-encapsulated chip that can run OK at 400 deg C will desolder itself from a conventionally-built planar).
Boeing accelerated their flight test programme by putting about six aircraft into a year-long test schedule rather than the two or three airframes they intended to operate for about 18 months or so. That means they need more flight-rated engines for testing than they expected at this point in development.
As I recall Linux was derived from previous strains of Unix and included uncorrected bugs from its predecessors. There was one such bug that was finally spotted a couple of years ago that had been in the Unix kernel code since the 80s, a 32-bit multiply routine which returned a 32-bit result, not a 64-bit value as it should have. This bug was in the Linux kernel from day one and stayed there until recently.
So yes, Virginia a 16-year-old OS CAN have a 25-year-old bug.
What surprises me is that the active parts of the antenna system on the i4 can be touched at all. Nearly every antenna I've ever seen used in portable radio gear, mobile phones etc. has been insulated in some manner -- either like the classic "rubber duck" helical antenna or as in most modern slab-like mobile phones it is hidden within a plastic casing.
It's worth noting that skin contact will also degrade the transmission signal levels, meaning the phone will increase its power output to remain in contact with the cell tower and so reduce the battery's endurance.
Sounds like there's a niche in the market for a large-capacity SSD with a small super-fast partition or segment stuck on the front. It would fit into a laptop or notebook as a single 2.5" or 1.8" form factor device and give the user a high-speed boot/program volume of say 16Gb or 32Gb and a slower backing store of 256Gb or more. Best of both worlds in one bundle, cheaper to produce and integrate than two separate devices.
So "Real Servers Are Headless", well apart from the serial terminal and the FEP controller and don't forget the serial-connected printer you'll need so you can work through the five thousand lines of log data with a highlighter to find out why the OS blew out last time as opposed to scanning a GUI-driven editor with context-sensitive folding and search options... Still it all makes work for a working man to do, I suppose.
Tesla and most other electric car designers use Li-chemistry batteries because of their energy density in terms of weight and volume. Sadly such batteries age poorly -- a six-year-old battery pack would be down to 40% of original capacity even if the car had only done 10,000 miles in those six years rather than the 100,000 miles quoted in the SEC filing.
The Tesla Roadster is a good-weather weekend toy, not a serious commuter vehicle. It has been sold to collectors and wealthy car enthusiasts in the main and as Tesla admit in their filing they have pretty much saturated that market. The S-series is/was an attempt to move down into (admittedly high-end) mass-market production and sales but it still has the ageing battery-pack problem to overcome. Given that the battery is a very expensive component to replace or recondition then that adds to the TCOO over the car's expected lifespan.
There are other battery technologies out there which are promising for electric vehicles but none are ready for prime-time and most of them are heavier and bulkier per stored megajoule than Li-chemistry cells.
The upgrade to 45TB may not be done with fifteen 3TB drives -- the key part of the tech they're promoting is the amount of storage they can cram into a 19" rack mount. I wonder how many 1TB 2.5" drives you could fit into the same volume if you were willing to pay the price?
Quick estimate: 15 x 2TB 3.5" drives at 80 quid each = 1200 smackers. 45 x 1TB 2.5" drives at 100 quid each = 4500 quid. Not cost-effective right now in terms of price per gigabyte but as the 2.5" drive prices fall it will become more and more affordable. Of course if there are 1.5TB 2.5" drives around the corner then that would add another possibility to the mix.
I bought a second-hand LX3 recently and have been giving it a good workout on a trip to Japan. My thoughts:
The LX3 can record 720p video -- most compacts limit out at VGA video resolution. The downside is that the framerate is limited to 24fps.
A fast f2.0 lens and large sensor means it works great indoors without a distracting flash being required. The flash itself is a pop-up device so it's pretty much impossible to leave it on auto by default and have it fire when you don't want it to.
The 24mm wide-angle setting is turning out to be more useful than I thought it would although the combination of the fast lens and wide-angle is probably the reason the zoom range is so limited.
What I miss on the LX3 are things like an optical viewfinder (I'm somewhat old-school) and a tilt-swivel LCD panel, both of which were features of my previous compact camera, a Canon A640 Powershot. The LX3's clip-on OE lenscap is an anachronism waiting to fall off and get lost but I have an aftermarket automatic lenscap on mine which does an OK job of protecting the glass.
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Re: I must be travelling to the wrong places
Nearly every businessman-type hotel I've stayed at in Japan had wired Ethernet for in-room Internet connection at no extra charge. A few had spectacularly crappy dropout-prone slow Wifi with insecure WEP keys etc. The crowning glory was the hotel which gave me a WPA key that didn't work until I realised Japanese folks didn't understand there was a difference between "hotelxxx" and "Hotelxxx".
Re: I'm wondering if it's time for a return of the "ring wing"
Ah yes, the ring wing. It was further developed into the SSZ concept aka the Super Sonic Zeppelin. Fit a shockwave-trapping ring wing around a lighter-than-air dirigible which provides the lift and it can go supersonic without those discomfiting bangy noises. Drag is someone else's problem.
Pollution
Every Shuttle launch required an EPA waiver due to the toxicity of the smoke from its solid rocket boosters.
HDMI better than you think
I've run my Dell u2711 at full resolution (2560x1440 same as the Apple display) via its HDMI connection from a ratty old AGP video card. The HDMI standard has been improved over the last few iterations and in the current version, V1.4, it can even cope with resolutions up to the 4096 x 2160 home-cinema format being pushed by Toshiba among others.
Dell u2711
As someone else mentioned earlier the Dell 27" display is the u2711 model, still available from Dell. There are suppliers who will sell you an open-box zero-defective-pixel Dell return model for under 500 quid delivered in the UK. The IPS panel in the Dell is exactly the same as the one Apple use, a Philips product if I understand correctly with the drive electronics and backlight differing.
I'm sitting in front of just such an open-box Dell u2711 display as I type this; it has two DVI-D ports, an HDMI port, a DisplayPort (HDMI with an Apple-specific connector so they don't have to pay licence fees apparently), a VGA port for old-skool types and even a couple of analogue ports if you've got some ancient video kit (like my laserdisc player) that can't talk proper digital. It also has a 4-port USB2.0 hub built-in plus an SD-card reader on the side of the frame.
The Dell's chassis can be bolted to a VESA mount if specialist fitting is required (wall mount or swivel-stand) unlike the Apple display although you can buy a VESA adaptor from Apple for about thirty quid extra.
Producing odd radioisotopes like Pu-238 or some of the ones used in medical treatments etc. requires specific amounts and energy levels of neutron flux, not something regular power reactors can produce. These isotopes are typically made in research reactors or specialist reactors dedicated to the task. A lot of the reactors in the West doing this sort of work have been shut down over the decades as they age or their operating regulations are tightened up underneath them. There's a shortage of medical isotope production on the horizon with only a couple of reactors left on-line in the West to make them, especially the short-lived stuff that needs continuous production to keep the demand satisfied. One of these reactors could be repurposed to make more Pu-238 but it couldn't make medical isotopes at the same time.
The Soviets^Russians have several isotope production reactors on-stream -- see the kerfuffle about the journalist poisoned by radioactive polonium a few years back -- but they don't have the sort of tight regs the West's production facilities labour under or indeed the requirement to make a profit.
The US does have some Pu-238 on hand but it is committed to black-budget DoD operations, for powering stealthy spy satellites that don't need a big array of solar panels to operate as well as deep-sea submarine listening stations to track shipping and sub movements around the world. This is the real reason the Russians stopped supplying the US with Pu-238 as despite promises the material they provided wouldn't be used for military purposes the US simply reallocated their "civilian" stockpile of Pu-238 to their military projects since Pu-238 like most other energy materials is fungible.
M$ Infiltrators
I have this vision of a team of camouflage-wearing crack MCPs breaking into suffering Linux users homes in the dead of night, installing Win7 on their terminally-broken Ubuntu machines and then disappearing into the darkness leaving behind functional computers and a card reading "Windows, it just works" propped up on the keyboard.
Packages
Intel are trying to stack die-on-die, not package-on-package which has been done for yonks -- My old Atari ST 520 got a RAM upgrade that way with sixteen DIL chips stacked on the existing RAM chips and some legs-in-the-air (Oooh, Missus!) wiring to cope with the extra address line.
The RasperryPi chips are low-power and low-speed -- Intel want to stack DRAM dies with a couple of microns separation on top of a CPU putting out 40 watts of heat and more. I think they'll have to come up with some kind of nanoengineered active cooling system to get the heat away from the silicon at a great enough rate to prevent meltdowns or thermal noise problems at high data speeds.
http://gizmodo.com/5845043/the-panasonic-lumix-phone-101p-might-not-suck-at-being-a-camera-or-a-phone
A 13.2Mpixel compact camera with a phone built in (or is it the other way round?) The bad news is it's only for the Japanese market.
Timescales
To properly test this rocket motor you need to cool it and subject it to an air pressure drop over the same sort of timescale that you expect the balloon launch to altitude to take rather than doing it over an arbitrary curve.
Cooling it down from ground temp (10 to 20C) to firing altitude air temp (-60C) could probably be done following a specific temperature vs. time profile by using a sealed jacket around the motor with a few mm separation between it and the inner wall of the jacket. Blow dried (to prevent ice formation from humid air) compressed air through a coil in an insulated box filled with dry ice pellets and into the jacket, adjusting the cooling flow rate to match the simulated launch to altitude temperature profile by monitoring a temperature gauge on or in the rocket body.
For the vacuum part of the test use a vacuum pump to exhaust a remote tank, don't connect the pump directly to the test chamber. A simple hand-valve connected between the tank and the test chamber and an eye on a pressure gauge monitoring the motor test chamber should allow the experimenter to control the decreasing pressure over a time curve which will be close to expected conditions. Right now the setup as specified will freeze the motor quickly in the presence of moist air at 1 bar before the air pressure drops and the moisture disappears for all intents and purposes.
A regular air compressor tank of 50 to 100 litres capacity should easily be enough to act as a vacuum tank. They're built for 6-8 bar operation and tested to beyond 10 bar so they will cope with 1 bar of "crush" without a problem. Do remember that the vacuum hose has to be quite thick-walled otherwise it will crush flat under vacuum but there is flexible plastic hose on the market that will do the job. Keeping the hoses short also helps as they also have to be pumped out as the system runs.
Using a tank also means you don't need a hefty vacuum pump as you can pump the tank down overnight, say, before you carry out the experiment. As someone else said a hard shutoff valve in the line between the test chamber and the tank is a good idea. A couple of poppet valves in the chamber lid is also recommended just in case the pop-off lid doesn't, err, pop off.
Not in the video I saw
"you have to dismount and replace the entire barrel/magazine unit to reload"
The video I saw showed no need to dismount and remount the MS launcher from the M-16, just open the rear of the breech and feed three rounds in then close it up again. It's possible you saw or were told about an earlier version which did require a dismount and remount.
"not often you need to hose an area with grenades" -- I can think of several situations where that would be useful, such as deploying smoke grenades to cover an area in front of your position. The MS launcher is a "semi-auto" system requiring a pull of the trigger for each grenade launched, it's not full-auto always firing all three rounds when used.
"Lastly, what do you do with the unit if you've only needed one grenade? " If you've got time and cover you can replace the used round by adding another to the stack in the breech. Your quibble is a bit like saying it's too difficult to keep track of how many rounds in a rifle's magazine have been expended.
I am reminded of the anecdotal quotes by retired majors over the centuries about the introduction of bolt-action/magazine-fed/self-loading rifles that they would lead to the undermining of a soldier's essential skills because they were too easy to use and wasteful of ammunition to boot.
Nothing wrong with Pu-238
Do you have any spare Pu-238 kicking around? Down the side of the couch perhaps, or out in the shed behind the lawnmower?
The US doesn't have a lot of Pu-238 left, and most if not all of that is now committed to their spook satellite and submarine RTG military projects. The last lot of civvie-street Pu-238 they had left is sticking out of the back of the Curiosity Mars rover as solar cells weren't considered sufficient to keep it alive and operational through a Mars winter, never mind the much larger power consumption of this vehicle compared to the previous rovers.
The scientific research reactors that made Pu-238 in the past have all been shut down or reworked to make medical radio-isotopes. The Soviets have some Pu-238 kicking around from their own scientific reactor programmes and they were selling it to the Yanks under a "civilian-use-only" licence then they discovered that the US DoD was comandeering the existing stocks of home-grown Pu-238 with the excuse that the civilians could use the Russian Pu-238 instead. This did not go down well in Moscow for some reason.
Video on Youtube, where else?
There's somewhat amateurish video on Youtube of the MS three-round underbarrel launcher in action. Three rounds in three seconds (it kicks a bit when fired and the weapon has to be brought down onto target again). The regular M203 is a lot slower to feed than that. Reloading three separate rounds into the MS takes longer than a single-round reload in the M203 (see the end of Scarface for a movie treatment of the process) but I'd estimate it's about the same time on a round per round basis.
Cons: the MS unit is bigger and heavier than the M203, I suspect the range of ammo types (smoke, fragmentation etc) available are limited and probably more expensive than the conventional M203 cartridge, the effective launch range may be reduced, it may be more fragile and less squaddie-proof than the M203 and it is almost certainly a lot more expensive.
Think different
The plus for Metal Storm tech in anti-personnel weaponry is the capacity and simplicity of the weapon rather than its super-fast rate of fire -- the million-rounds-a-minute deal was an anti-missile system, not meant to be man-portable.
The M203 underbarrel grenade launcher currently available for the M16 rifle is a single-shot item; it has to be opened and manually reloaded after every shot. The Metal Storm grenade launcher could fire three rounds from a device about the same size as the M203 without the rifleman having to stop and reload every time. Adding an autoloader and magazine feed for 40mm grenade shells would make the M203 very heavy and bulky and it would also be prone to jamming etc. Sadly for the Metal Storm shareholders, making their device squaddie-proof and getting paid for making them has so far eluded their engineers and salesmen.
Stresses and strains
Why would swinging a nuclear power plant's output put much thermomechanical stress on the core and vessel structures? The temperatures stay very much the same, it's the heat energy output that's reduced so the amount of coolant (which is also the moderator, one factor that makes this operation non-trivial) flow is reduced. This means a smaller amount of secondary-loop steam is generated hence less torque at the generator turbine blades and less electromotive power in the generator set. It's not optimally efficient and it helps if the genset and secondary loop systems are built from the outset to cope with variable output, not an option in older existing designs.
There are other problems such as neutron poisoning when swinging a reactor's output but I don't know the details of how the French are able to deal with those particular issues.
As for replacing the sparkly bits, the new EP-1000 design is actually capable of allowing this to be done. The reactor building is constructed before the reactor vessel itself is installed rather than the usual technique of building the structure and containment around the vessel in-situ. In the case of a fault developing or the vessel wearing out it could be removed and replaced without knocking down the building to get at it. This capability is really there to allow for cheaper end-of-life decommissioning of the reactor rather than allowing running repairs though.
At the time I'm writing this (late evening 16th June) we're taking 800MW from the French pool according to your link. It swings through the day but as I understand it most of the time the link feeds power to us from the French side. Wintertime might have a higher load on the link for us rather than this period of near-arctic long summer daylight with lower demand peaks.
Demand following
The French nuclear operators have worked out how to modify the output of their modern nuclear plants to allow for reduced demand; last reports I saw said they could swing the output of some stations between 70% and 100% in 30 minutes at the cost of fuel burning efficiency -- given the low cost of nuclear fuel that is less of a consideration than a carbon-burning station.
With more of their neighbours such as Spain and Germany commmitting themselves to being dependent on renewables the French may not need to do this much as they will be able to sell excess nuclear baseload across their borders to prevent brownouts and blackouts in such countries. As an aside, Britain has been buying about 2GW of French nuclear power pretty much continuously since a cross-Channel HV DC power connector was installed back in the 90s.
Digging deeper
Germany is commissioning 6GW of new coal-burning power stations this year, with more to come. They've got hundreds of years of surface-mined brown coal they can dig up and burn to supplement their renewables. It's filthy, polluting and extracting it destroys the countryside but it's cheap and nobody cares enough to put a stop to it they way they do about nuclear power.
Injuries
Some people were injured in the reactor building explosions but several people died when the actual tsunami hit the plant and a crane operator at the other Fukushima plant (Daini) died as well. As for the three workers with radiation burns on the feet and legs, the news that they were released from hospital after four days was not as prominently reported as the original event probably because "Men perfectly OK after scary radiation incident" doesn't grab the headlines.
OTOH there is new information coming out on tests being carried out on the Fukushima first-responder workers suggests that some of them ingested or inhaled significant amounts of radioactive material during the first few days of the incident, enough to put several of them over the 250mSv annual dose limit in a few days working on the site. The small amount of information released suggests the medical authorities don't think the men's health is seriously at risk from their exposure (no cases of radiation poisoning mentioned) but it shouldn't have happened at all.
Reprise
The Dukester sang "Born to be Wild" in the last game. Badly. Really really badly. I expect he won't change his tune.
Earthquakes
I saw the proposal to flood the primary containment of one or more of the reactors on a Japanese news website. My worry about doing something like that would be the effects of the extra mass in the reactor building if another major earthquake came along, with several hundred extra tonnes of water sloshing around and damaging the pressure vessel support structures and even the secondary containment.
I think the idea of flooding was to passively cool the cores by circulation and conduction through the water to the much larger surface of the primary containment vessel. This might effectively bring the whole thing to cold shutdown without requiring actively circulating water to remove decay heat as they are doing to Daiichi reactors 5 and 6 at the moment as well as the Daini, Tokai and Onagawa plant reactors.
Powered Armour
Starship Troopers was actually made as a six-part Japanese anime series back in the late 80s. It is more faithful to the book than the movie version made later. You can perhaps find copies of it floating in the piratical seas of the Internet if you look hard, and there are rumours of a fansubbed version I understand. You can't miss it, Juan Rico has green hair.
Demon Breed
by James H. Schmitz. It's a short novel, which makes it easier to turn into a 90-minute movie. The action is suspenseful and keeps moving plus there's a chance for some good acting as Nile Etland takes on the role of Tuvela in-story. Having giant hunting otters as sidekicks is a cherry on the top (Spiff and Sweeting for the win!) Cameron could recycle a lot of the CGI forestry work he put into Avatar to make the floatwood islands which are the background for the action.
If you don't know the story you'll find it in Baen's Free Library for legal download, in the collection "The Hub -- Dangerous Territory" edited by Eric Flint. Recommended.
It's not rocket science, it's *ATOMIC* science !!
If there was any amount of moderated fission going on in the pool then the Bequerel count ratio of iodine to cesium would be massive as iodine-131 is much more active than either of the cesium isotopes, and Bequerel levels are tied in to activity. What those numbers show is that most of the iodine has died away because of its short half-life. There's still a lot of it in the sample because there was a massive amount (atomically speaking) to start with in the spent fuel rods. If any substantial amount of fission was going on in the pool then the amount of iodine-131 leaking out of the damaged fuel rods would result in counts in the kilo- or even mega-bequerel level per cubic centimetre.
The fission the report refers to happened months ago when about half of the rods now in the pool were in the operating reactor core which was defuelled in November last year. The other half of the rods are from the last time this reactor was defuelled, probably three years or so ago. Those older rods were probably scheduled to be removed to the off-reactor common pool storage or prepped for dry-cask storage when the tsunami hit.
Head Desk Moment
Here's someone reporting his efforts to protect his garden and compost heap from radioactive fallout from Fukushima:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7794#comment-792308
After the expected snowfall, his hand burned when he wiped some water off the plastic sheeting but soap and water dealt with the contamination and he's now wearing rubber gloves when handling the polluted water.
He lives in northern Arizona. In the USA.
If anything Lewis is understating the amount of crazy stupid that is running around screaming "The world is ending! The world is ending!"
Numbers not hiragana letters
"Dai" in this case is a counter, like "number" so Daiichi is "number 1", the same as a popular businessman hotel chain in Japan which is probably getting fewer bookings these days for some reason. Since the Japs do like operator overloading in their language "dai" also means "big" although the kanji character for "big" is different to the one for "number".
Paris, because of her Daiichis.
Damn dams
A dam forming a water reservoir failed during the recent earthquake up in the hills behind Fukushima. The resulting flood killed at least four people and at last reports another few folks were missing from the washed-out houses devastated by the wall of water, but since it wasn't radioactivity from damaged reactors that killed these people, just benign and safe H2O from a renewable resource this particular lethal disaster hasn't been big news on the world stage. Then again death and destruction from dam failures is so common it's rarely worth commenting on unless the number of people killed gets into the thousands.
In fact
There already are a bunch of reactors stitched along the NW coast of Honshu on the Sea of Japan coast, facing Russia. Some of them were taken out of commission by, guess what, an earthquake in 2007. As for why they built reactor plants at Fukushima facing a giant subduction zone out in the Pacific, when they planned them back in the 1960s the idea of plate tectonics was just gaining legitimacy and nobody had mapped the crustal plates and understood that the coast there was prone to rare very powerful offshore earthquakes and tsunamis -- everywhere in Japan gets earthquakes after all. There was also a bit of local/national politics, vote-buying and pork-barreling going on, Japan same old same old.
The Fukushima Daini (number 2) reactor plant is only a few kilometres south of the Daiichi (number 1, gotta give the Japanese full marks for imaginative labelling of things...) and it rode out the tsunami OK with all four reactors there shutting down almost without incident. The three reactors further south at Okagawa ditto and even the last remaining reactor in commission at Tokai Daini shut down properly and safely too.
Spike is on the job
A good article with some real numbers about the power station shutdowns in Japan and an explanation of Japan's two separate national grids which prevents load sharing to any great extent can be found here.
http://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/after-the-earthquake-a-long-hot-summer/
Another 10,000 old folks could die of heatstroke due to the reduced amount of power available for air conditioning in the big cities during the summer and autumn.
Plutonium
Plutonium is not that toxic, compared to arsenic (an incredibly toxic metal pumped out into the surrounding countryside in tonne quantities by coal-fired power stations) or beryllium (cumulative, doesn't chelate, wrecks the immune system, no cure). People known to have being contaminated by plutonium, usually by inhalation of oxide dust particles, in the US nuclear weapons development programme in the 1940s and 1950s were tracked and monitored closely afterwards. I've seen a report that of ten such individuals four or five were still alive fifty years later. Only one of the sample clade had died of the effects of cancer, the rest from assorted diseases common in old age.
Radiotoxicity for Pu is low to medium, an alpha emitter with half-life of over 10,000 years for the two common isotopes (239 and 240) found in fuel rods. It's definitely not good news in large amounts in tissue but there is a lot worse in the nuclear zoo biologically speaking -- polonium-208, cobalt-60, cesium-137...
Different types of water
These are Boiling Water Reactors (BWR) -- water is sprayed onto the core in the reactor vessel to produce steam that then drives turbine-generator sets to produce electricity. That water is in a closed loop, in part because it is treated to remove dissolved oxygen, minerals etc. It is very pure water to prevent corrosion, buildups of deposits etc. in the pipes as well as preventing radioactive "daughter" isotopes since it is 99.99% hydrogen and oxygen. As a matter of interest the same sort of clean water is used in coal and oil-fired power stations that use boilers -- the deoxygenated water/steam reduces cumulative damage to the pipes and the blades of the turbines.
After the steam comes out of the turbines it goes into external condenser units which are cooled by seawater pumped up from the shore. The steam turns back into water and is returned to the reactor for another go-through. They don't have any more deionised water to hand or they can't pump it into the reactor fast enough so they're going to use seawater which they have plenty of close to hand. They have accepted the reactors are never going to run again, much like triggering the fire extinguishing systems in a data centre means a nice future bonus for the area's server hardware sales guy.
Fair's fair
The Consumer Reports people did treat the iPhone fairly. They tested it properly instead of relying on one-off anecdotal reports and found, not surprisingly that skin contact with the bare antenna detuned the radio TX/RX subsystem in the phone, reducing its ability to maintain a connection in low signal strength areas and also increasing battery power drain into the bargain. No-one else designing phones or any sort of mobile radio system makes an antenna where the conducting element can be touched or shorted out for this reason. Holding the phone does tend to screen the antenna somewhat but does not detune it the way direct electrical contact does.
The radio engineers at Apple were overriden by the case designers who wanted a Shiny! eyecatch strip of metal around the edge of the case. Even a thin layer of plastic or rubber over the antenna surface to keep fingers off would have prevented this screwup but that wasn't to be.
Prediction: the iPhone 5 and successors will NOT have a bare antenna that can be touched by fingers.
Error correction
The introduction of soft error recovery in the FP units and caches is going to sound very tasty to the supercomputer-builders.
Where are they going?
It was originally intended that the ISS was going to be "decommissioned" into the upper atmosphere in 2016 or so. The owners might extend its lifespan to 2020 but that's debatable and very dependent on funding. So where are these future manned launches going to go to? A replacement for the ISS isn't even a paper exercise at the moment let alone a fundable project, and like the Moonshot it's been done and there's no real point in doing it twice. Spam-in-a-can in orbit has been done and we don't really need to do that any more just to be doing it.
There's the Bigelow space-hotel balloons which have still not been tested for habitability and survivability, maybe a Mir 3 based on Progress modules by the Soviets, sorry Russians and that's it, basically. Any future Moonshot or manned Mars missions will involve new-design Big Dumb Boosters like the Ares V with a small manned-launch component but the days of lots of humans (i.e. more than ten at a time) in LEO is coming to an end with the Shuttle being retired and until someone finds a good reason for there to be lot of humans in space and is willing to pay for it then manned spaceflight is going to be quite rare after this decade is out.
Man-rating
There are other factors in man-rating such as the acceleration profile of the flight. Hardware can be built to take 5-G plus for long periods during launch whereas meatbags don't work right in such conditions. Apollo and the Shuttle topped out at about 3G in flight as I recall. There's also vibration and sheer noise levels which can be too much for yoomans but which don't affect hardware in the same way.
Man-rating Ariane would cost money and would provide a native European human spaceflight capability assuming the funding and development of a home-grown capsule which would also cost money (and probably be over budget). At that point the world would have yet another man-rated launch system elbowing its way into a tiny launch market which has no real commercial return and which is already filled by the Soyuz system. After the Shuttles go to various museums the SpaceX Dragon or similar plus (maybe) the Ares 1 will fill in the US side of things or they'll simply buy seats from the Soviets, sorry Russians too.
Money
ESA have paper designs for a re-entry capsule built on the ATV 'bus' but that will cost money to design, build and fly and ESA's budget is pretty much tapped out with the existing Ariane flights for the next three ATVs including Kepler and their part of the Galileo project. There's also the Vega small scientific launcher AKA Berlusconi's Bottle Rocket which should fly for the first time this year as well as the new Soyuz launch facility being built in New Guinea to provide commercial Progress launches, all of which are costing more than planned (of course).
If Europe really wanted to get a man into space then using the new Soyuz launchpad would probably be best with a proven man-rated booster and capsule combo bought off-the-shelf from the Soviets, sorry, Russians rather than trying to man-rate the Ariane and design a capsule version of the ATV in another round of reinvent-the-wheel.
Duh, still wrong
The Hi-power was designed in the 1920s in competition with a range of other light 9mm self-loading pistols coming from other manufacturers, adding features as a double-action trigger and John Moses Browning was long dead by the time its design was finalised.
As for defensive/offensive use of handguns the limitations tend to be on physical size and weight for everyday carry. The 1911 is large and heavy for a handgun but its smaller brother, the Colt Commander is within the boundaries for civilian carry and is likewise chambered for the .45ACP round. There are of course a whole range of other calibres the 1911 design has been modified to take, down to .22LR. I don't know the biggest round the Hi-power and derivatives can cope with but most DA double-stack semi-auto designs tend to top out at .40S&W.
Uh, wrong
The Browning Hi-Power is a double-action 9mm pistol with a double-stack magazine, no grip safety and a different blowback system to the single-action M1911 45ACP single-stack magazine with a grip safety and its famous swivelling-link blowback system. They're two different designs, trading reliability and bullet size in the 1911 for greater magazine capacity and higher accuracy in the Hi-Power.
The few problems with the original Browning M1911 design were fixed by Colt who mass-produced it for the US military as the 1911A1.
The real "trench broom" in WWI was the 1897 Winchester pump-action shotgun, complete in military fitout with a bayonet lug. I heard of a collector using one a while back in a clay-pigeon shoot, blasting away at the clays with the original-issue 18-inch long sword bayonet in place.
Law of the Sea
Just thinking that one of these unmanned vessels would be classed under international maritime laws as an abandoned vessel and hence ripe for salvage by anyone who could put a crew aboard and take it over. At that point either it could be sold to the highest bidder or the original owners (the US government in this case) would have to buy it back at a price set by the appropriate Receiver of Wreck officials. Step and repeat...
Well duh
"It will take a considerable effort to make this incompatible"
Yes that's true. Do you think Apple will not expend that effort?
Batteries are batteries
"Because the iPad battery should last a good deal longer than three years."
The iPad has a regular Lithium-tech battery from the same el-cheapo produciton lines everybody else gets their cells from and they start to degrade pretty much the day they are made. The iPad's battery not going to last much longer than the folio battery will.
"take it in and buy a new iPad or new battery. Chances are buyers will want the former anyway."
The future iPad will not be backwards compatible with the old iPad so this folio/kbd unit will not work with it anyway.
Law and the electric car
The people who wanted to buy the EV-1 cars they were leasing wanted to drive them, not put them in museums. Under US law that would mean GM had a legal obligation to supply spare parts for ten years after they were sold and provide maintenance facilities to keep the cars in safe working order. The cars cost over half a million dollars each as it was (a small production run of very non-standard vehicles) and the ongoing costs of selling the cars would not be met by the money the owners would pay for such services. The experiment produced some data on electric car operation, mostly showing how difficult it was going to be to have EVs in widespread use. Once the experiment was over GM's liability ended when the EV-1s were scrapped which is WHY they were scrapped.
Heat
Switching signals involves converting electrical energy into heat. Compact switch layouts have less area to dissipate the same amounts of heat. 3D structures have even more problems getting the heat away from the switches. Two ways around this are to use less energy per switch transition (which raises other problems in itself such as thermal and electrical noise swamping the signal) and the other is to use materials and switch technologies that don't degrade when hot (which causes knockon problems with packaging and assembly technologies -- a ceramic-encapsulated chip that can run OK at 400 deg C will desolder itself from a conventionally-built planar).
Flight testing
Boeing accelerated their flight test programme by putting about six aircraft into a year-long test schedule rather than the two or three airframes they intended to operate for about 18 months or so. That means they need more flight-rated engines for testing than they expected at this point in development.
Pre-natal whoopsies
As I recall Linux was derived from previous strains of Unix and included uncorrected bugs from its predecessors. There was one such bug that was finally spotted a couple of years ago that had been in the Unix kernel code since the 80s, a 32-bit multiply routine which returned a 32-bit result, not a 64-bit value as it should have. This bug was in the Linux kernel from day one and stayed there until recently.
So yes, Virginia a 16-year-old OS CAN have a 25-year-old bug.
Insulation
What surprises me is that the active parts of the antenna system on the i4 can be touched at all. Nearly every antenna I've ever seen used in portable radio gear, mobile phones etc. has been insulated in some manner -- either like the classic "rubber duck" helical antenna or as in most modern slab-like mobile phones it is hidden within a plastic casing.
It's worth noting that skin contact will also degrade the transmission signal levels, meaning the phone will increase its power output to remain in contact with the cell tower and so reduce the battery's endurance.
There can only be two
Sounds like there's a niche in the market for a large-capacity SSD with a small super-fast partition or segment stuck on the front. It would fit into a laptop or notebook as a single 2.5" or 1.8" form factor device and give the user a high-speed boot/program volume of say 16Gb or 32Gb and a slower backing store of 256Gb or more. Best of both worlds in one bundle, cheaper to produce and integrate than two separate devices.
Give it some head...
So "Real Servers Are Headless", well apart from the serial terminal and the FEP controller and don't forget the serial-connected printer you'll need so you can work through the five thousand lines of log data with a highlighter to find out why the OS blew out last time as opposed to scanning a GUI-driven editor with context-sensitive folding and search options... Still it all makes work for a working man to do, I suppose.
It's always been about the batteries
Tesla and most other electric car designers use Li-chemistry batteries because of their energy density in terms of weight and volume. Sadly such batteries age poorly -- a six-year-old battery pack would be down to 40% of original capacity even if the car had only done 10,000 miles in those six years rather than the 100,000 miles quoted in the SEC filing.
The Tesla Roadster is a good-weather weekend toy, not a serious commuter vehicle. It has been sold to collectors and wealthy car enthusiasts in the main and as Tesla admit in their filing they have pretty much saturated that market. The S-series is/was an attempt to move down into (admittedly high-end) mass-market production and sales but it still has the ageing battery-pack problem to overcome. Given that the battery is a very expensive component to replace or recondition then that adds to the TCOO over the car's expected lifespan.
There are other battery technologies out there which are promising for electric vehicles but none are ready for prime-time and most of them are heavier and bulkier per stored megajoule than Li-chemistry cells.
Reading too much into it?
The upgrade to 45TB may not be done with fifteen 3TB drives -- the key part of the tech they're promoting is the amount of storage they can cram into a 19" rack mount. I wonder how many 1TB 2.5" drives you could fit into the same volume if you were willing to pay the price?
Quick estimate: 15 x 2TB 3.5" drives at 80 quid each = 1200 smackers. 45 x 1TB 2.5" drives at 100 quid each = 4500 quid. Not cost-effective right now in terms of price per gigabyte but as the 2.5" drive prices fall it will become more and more affordable. Of course if there are 1.5TB 2.5" drives around the corner then that would add another possibility to the mix.
LX3 plusses and minuses
I bought a second-hand LX3 recently and have been giving it a good workout on a trip to Japan. My thoughts:
The LX3 can record 720p video -- most compacts limit out at VGA video resolution. The downside is that the framerate is limited to 24fps.
A fast f2.0 lens and large sensor means it works great indoors without a distracting flash being required. The flash itself is a pop-up device so it's pretty much impossible to leave it on auto by default and have it fire when you don't want it to.
The 24mm wide-angle setting is turning out to be more useful than I thought it would although the combination of the fast lens and wide-angle is probably the reason the zoom range is so limited.
What I miss on the LX3 are things like an optical viewfinder (I'm somewhat old-school) and a tilt-swivel LCD panel, both of which were features of my previous compact camera, a Canon A640 Powershot. The LX3's clip-on OE lenscap is an anachronism waiting to fall off and get lost but I have an aftermarket automatic lenscap on mine which does an OK job of protecting the glass.
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