They don't need nuclear weapons, as Japan is under the US nuclear umbrella per the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan. It was done on the condition that Japan not develop their own nuclear weapons.

Even if Japan didn't fall under the US nuclear umbrella, China has a formal "no first use" policy for their nuclear weapons, and even if they *did* want to use their nuclear weapons in a first-use strike against a non-belligerent and non-nuclear nation, the political cost of such a move would be catastrophic for China.

Japan's navy is light on larger ships, but they still have 2 aircraft carriers (and may convert their other helicopter carriers at some point), 36 destroyers, 22 submarines, 10 frigates, and a bunch of other smaller craft. All quite modern too. That's not enough to defeat the entire Chinese navy, but it's enough to make an amphibious landing impractical. And this is ignoring that a large number of US Navy ships are based in Japan, including an entire carrier strike group.

Pro support is paid extended security support. Unless you work for a company that is willing to pay for security patches for an operating system that dropped mainstream support nearly a year ago and is now twelve major releases out of date, there's not much reason to be using 18.04 still.

That said, while I don't begrudge Microsoft dropping support for it, they could still have handled the transition far better, for example by refusing to update if an incompatible version of glibc is detected.

The JSDF isn't exactly the US military, but it's large and well funded and equipped. A quarter million active duty personnel armed with large amounts of modern equipment is hardly "zero effective defense". The Japanese navy is quite substantial at this point too.

Seems like the kind of thing that could easily be aliased in powershell with a function in the user profile named "sudo".

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q...

Do we actually know how accurate GLONASS is? The only accuracy data we have is on the low-precision unencrypted signals. As far as I know, Russia hasn't released any information about the precision of the encrypted high-accuracy signals, but there's no reason to believe they're not similar to GPS, block II at least. There are also other global systems in operation that they can use, such as Galileo or BeiDou.

Russian weapons use the high-precision military signals from the Russian GLONASS constellation. How does access to GPS change that?

Does it actually matter if Russia gets access? The civilian and military signals at this point have the same accuracy, and Russia's already got their own equivalent satellite constellation, GLONASS.

If they grew by one percentage point, going from 2.4% to 3.4% is massive growth, that's a 42% increase in just one year.

You can do a lot with half a gigawatt hour of capacity. Peak shaving. Frequency management. Load shifting. Power for black starts. They're super valuable. But they're not a replacement for baseline capacity. Not at this scale. Scale it up by an order of magnitude and you can start doing that sort of thing with it, but that's not economical yet.

You could do that if the site was working. It currently works fine on mobile, but on desktop, it's super broken. The buttons don't do anything, if you hotlink to a country page there's no search box, and only the first five posters load on any given page.

It's not a good first impression for anybody who might try to check it out.

It's actually a lot worse than that, for two reasons:

1) 325kg mass is not accurate for iROSA, as that was for a prototype unit that was permanently jettisoned after the test and presumably didn't provide the same power as the final design. For the final design, SpaceX CRS-22 launched the first two permanent iROSA arrays with a combined mass of 1380kg, or 690 kg per array (https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/spacex_crs-22_mision_overview_high_res.pdf). This also ignores the mass of the parts of the existing solar system that are being re-used, which includes everything from the mounting hardware to the station, the motors to re-orient the panels, and all the electrical systems. 690kg is for basically just the bare panels and nothing else.

2) You did the math of 325kg against the entire iROSA system instead of just a single array. The new arrays (at 690 kg) provide 28 kW of power each, expected to drop to 20 kW within 10 years.

Even if we ignore the mass of all the electrical equipment and mounting equipment a standalone install would require, we still get 690kg for 20 kw, which gives us 185 watts = 6.4 kg, more than an order of magnitude more than 0.5.

Let's assume that the only advantage of space-based is that it can produce stable power 24/7 from geostationary orbit and thus doesn't need storage (any differences in efficiency or amount of power is simply a potential mass reduction). How much would a traditional land-based photovoltaic and storage system cost that can provide constant stable power 24/7 (meaning it has to be over-spec'ed to provide a certain minimum amount of power even on days with poor weather conditions)? Your space-based power system, including the cost of launch, orbital infrastructure, and ground infrastructure, needs to be cheaper than that.

Instead, I think you'll find that the space-based approach will cost multiple orders of magnitude more, and as the cost of ground-based solar power systems continues to fall, space-based solar power will probably always be orders of magnitude more expensive.

Each interlaced field represents a separate point in time, 60 discrete points in time per second. Interlaced television was not typically 30 progressive frames split into two fields, it was effectively 60 progressive frames with half the scanlines of each discarded.

480i60 content when viewed on a CRT does indeed look like 60 FPS. In fact, compared to modern displays, it would have looked even smoother than what we think of as 60 FPS due to CRTs being low persistence displays. The only time it would look like 30 FPS is if it's poorly deinterlaced for progressive display.

As far as I can tell, there is no motion interpolation going on here. The 24 FPS telecine'd film content of the special still looks much lower framerate than the 60 FPS live action scenes.