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Comment Re:A strange game.... (Score 1) 597

We can prevent NK from bombing Seoul or marching 35 miles, if we strike hard enough in the first strike. It would help if China was on board, but it's not necessary.

We possibly could but that's not the real threat to the South.

NK is believed to have at least thirteen thousand artillery tubes pointed at Seoul. Most of them are embedded. We don't have that many bunker-buster bombs in inventory. We can't deliver that many precision munitions in an hour even if we did, and we don't know where most of the tubes are. Even the most conservative estimates (such as the recent one by Roger Cavazos) put the death toll at 30,000 Seoul civilians where the high end one count in the millions. And that's just the first hours.

Comment Re:On the oil/steam separator... (Score 1) 144

can you not otherwise impart enough heat to flash boil the water? Why not a big metallic thermal load, made out of recycled popcans?

I believe the trick here is that because you're injecting the "fuel" (liquid water) and injecting the heat source you are able to very precisely control the timing of the engine as well as control the steam's wave front. If you had a static heat source inside the engine there's not only the question of how you deliver heat to that, but also how you control triggering of the phase change.

Comment Re:On the oil/steam separator... (Score 1) 144

Also separating oil and water is easy, seeing as they don't actually mix.

The oil is assuredly atomized to increase surface area and heat transfer, seeing as the timing of such an engine depends on precise (and rapid) water phase change. Much like a diesel engine you're relying on very precise injection timing and predictably fast burning/expansion.

A oil/water mixture composed of such tiny droplets is not trivial to separate.

Comment Re:Upgraded Apple TV announced (Score 1) 989

The drivers for hardware decoding on the Apple TV2 are very good. 1080p (downscaled) and 720p play perfectly with XBMC on a jailbroken ATV2.

That is assuming they are encoded with x/h264. MPEG4 ASP plays fine SD but only marginal HD, and that's because the CPU is slow.

Comment Re:One more issue (Score 1) 1065

The question is, why should someone with low income but fully owned property NOT be allowed to live in it?

Because real estate is special. All real estate is owned by individuals through patent by the government. The point of real estate is to benefit society as a whole through development and wealth creation. Property taxes are a purposeful disincentive on "sitting" on a piece of valuable property.

Comment Re:Is it possible to combine systems in a receiver (Score 1) 168

Your vendor is likely confusing you (and perhaps themselves).

GPS horizontal positioning does not require a very precise model of the earth.

GPS vertical positioning does not require a very precise model of the earth.

The gotcha there is that GPS works in ellipsoidal heights, NOT elevation. The ellipsoid is a simplified model of the earth. Elevation is height above mean sea level if the sea reached where you are. The elevation of any point measured by GPS is a combination of the ellipsoidal height and a gravity map (if there were no land, no wind, no tides the sea would still be uneven due to uneven distribution of gravity potential) called a geoid model.

As for lock and initialization times - I routinely profile roads, in traffic, and have no trouble maintaining initialization. That and a Trimble R8 GNSS (R8 model III) can initialize FAR faster than 20 seconds.

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