Ballistic coefficient is dependent on the surface area of the projectile and its mass and a big heavy projectile with the same muzzle velocity as a small light projectile will retain more velocity all the way to the target. A .223 bullet will lose about 200 m/s of its original muzzle velocity over a distance of 300 metres. A similarly-shaped but larger and heavier .50BMG bullet with a similar muzzle velocity will lose about 80 m/s over the same distance, according to Hornady ballistics tables. If you've done any large-calibre shooting you'll know something like a .50BMG will carry a lot further than a .223.

Smaller diameter projectiles have more drag per unit mass and slow down faster due to air resistance. It's called their ballistic coefficient.

The practice for howitzer-like weapons like railguns is to fire their projectiles in a high arc to get them out of thick atmosphere as fast as possible to reduce air friction. They still won't hit their target at anything like their muzzle velocity even after they recover some kinetic energy on the way back down to target from the top of their parabolic arc.

The ballistically efficient shells from the late-model 15" US Naval rifles had a muzzle velocity of about 3500 feet/second and a flight time to target at maximum range (25 miles or so) of a couple of minutes. Their velocity at impact was half that of their muzzle velocity. I don't see these railgun projectiles achieving anything like that performance as drag increases roughly as the square of velocity and their ballistic coefficient will be a lot less.

Flats in this block and neighbouring sell for US $500,000 plus when they come on the market which is rarely. Round the corner from us are million-buck town houses and if you're really got the moolah or work for Google there's a place for sale about 200 metres to the west, offers to exceed US $40 million.

commercialsearch.savills.co.uk/content/assets/839/Donaldsons_Final.pdfâZ

Bad area, I don't think so. Overcrowded by the standards of an American gated McMansion gulag, definitely. After all we have a main-line railway station across the street, bus and express coach stops outside our door and a (useless) new tram stop across the street at the railway station entrance. We have many pubs, restaurants and shops a few minutes walk from the front door, supermarkets ten minutes walk away, cinemas (including a couple of award-winning arthouse places) fifteen minutes walk from here. What we don't have is a lot of parking spaces and garages suitable for electric vehicles and without the ability to charge them where they're parked they're not much use compared to the many conventionally-fuelled cars and hybrids littering the surrounding streets.

"which of course have 64-bit x86 CPUs and run a 64-bit Windows."

So, problem solved. Excellent.

"it's not going to be long before smartphones and tablets have > 3 GiB RAM"

You mean like the MS Surface Pro (4 GiB and 8 GiB models?), the Acer Iconias, Fujitsu Stylistic tablets etc.?

Reproduction shops can add texture given a lot of work and significant amounts of cash money for each "print". They can't easily add translucency and layering of colours unless they reproduce the painting process itself stroke by stroke which is a lot harder to achieve and it's these sorts of effects that make coming face-to-face with the originals of fine artwork a revelation.

"If I had the world's greatest art at my fingertips... would I fill my home with it? No. I already have access to the same art. I can get prints or lithographs of any of it and really its close enough that would would care."

I once had the pleasure of helping to organise an artshow of original works by an artist whose main income was from selling artbooks and limited-edition prints as well as commercial commissions doing book covers and the like. The originals (he worked in oils mainly) had texture and colour the reproductions and prints could not match no matter how expertly they were produced. Seeing his work up close was a revelation.

When I had my own vehicles I parked in side streets when I could find a space; there are more residents with cars than spaces for them, a deliberate decision by the local council to deter car ownership in the city centre. There's little or no private off-road parking around this area as it's typical high-density housing, blocks of tenement flats with thirty or forty people living on a land footprint smaller than a US McMansion with a three-car garage and a driveway, the sort of home wealthy electric vehicle owners have.

I've read histories about early car users, enthusiasts who were rich enough to afford the equivalent of a Tesla more than a hundred years ago. It was easy to arrange a delivery of benzene or petrol fuels in cans even when there weren't gas stations every few dozen miles. All it took was money and a horse-drawn wagon. Kerbside charging points will only be installed in the city centre if and when the local authority pays for them which will be never, basically. They'd rather blow a billion dollars on a new tram system.

I live in a block of flats, I don't have a garage or other place to plug in a car to charge it on a regular basis. I'd have to visit a local supermarket car park which has two electric vehicle charging bays at the moment to charge an electric car if I owned one. It's about a kilometre from home on foot and the car park rules only allow me to park there for two hours at a time before I'd have to pay penalty fees of up to £80 a day. That's assuming either of those bays is free when I get there of course.

There are millions of people like me in the same situation, not rich enough to afford the infrastructure necessary to own and operate an electric car. I've not got any sort of car at the moment and no real need for one (one of the benefits of living in a major city centre with excellent public transport) but I had no problem running a car when I did have one, spending five minutes in a petrol station filling up with diesel when I noticed the tank was running low. Can't do that with electric cars.

Fast-charging an 85kW battery, the same capacity as fitted to the Tesla S, from 20% to full in five minutes would take about 700kW or roughly the power feed for thirty-five typical US homes (100A @ 200V). If the "gas" station wanted to charge two batteries at the same time then double that figure. Halve the charge time to two minutes, double the power feed rating again. Assuming 400V battery packs a 2-minute fast charge unit would require connectors and cables rated to handle about 10,000 amps.

Folks don't realise just how much energy there is in a litre of gasoline sometimes.

How well would, say, California today cope with a large tsunami with peak heights of up to 15 metres? What are its sea defences like, are folks willing to pay billions or trillions of dollars to pay for installing and upgrading precautions against a once-in-a-millenium event?

Japan gets earthquakes like the Mississippi valley gets tornadoes, they plan for them, their building codes are written around them and as a result few people die even in a large earthquake. Tokyo experienced the equivalent of a Richter 7.1 during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, I think one person was killed when a section of interior roof fell on top of her. That's not bad for earth movements greater than, say, the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California which killed more than 50 people.

Actually the tsunami defences along the Tohoku coast were a lot lower than the 5-metre high seawalls at Fukushima Daiichi, where defences existed at all of course. Lots of towns still don't have that much in the way of sea walls in place, Itami for instance.

Onomichi, a little seaside town in Japan I visit regularly has tsunami defence walls about a metre high with access gates through them to the piers and quays oceanside. The only change I've seen there since the 2011 tsunami are notices telling people not to park blocking the seagates so they can be closed in an emergency. Life goes on, Nihon.

Once you actually look, you find out the UN does a lot of productive stuff like peacekeeping and conflict monitoring, elections, health and welfare, education etc. It's just that sometimes the UN doesn't do as the American government tells it to do so it is by definition ineffective and unproductive.

http://www.theonion.com/articl...

There are plenty of places to bury waste, even spent fuel if the owners don't want to reprocess it. The fact is there isn't really a lot of spent fuel or reprocessed fuel waste around at the moment to dispose of. France, which has run forty power reactors for thirty years and more has a few hundred cubic metres of vitrified high-level waste and that's all. It's not a Hollywood movie scenario where this waste will start roaming the countryside destroying everything in its path with its fiery breath or converting mild-mannered Dr. Bruce Banner into the Hulk, it just sits there in large blocks of glass. It doesn't even glow in the dark.

Finland of all places is actually in the process of digging a deep hole, 500 metres down into shield bedrock, to put their spent fuel into. They expect this deep repository to handle about 400 reactor-years worth of spent fuel in the end and it will cost about a billion dollars US over a century or so before they cap it off. They've already got the money to pay for building it in the bank from a levy on electricity generated by their existing reactors over the past couple of decades.

Dry storage of spent fuel on the surface will suffice for most places for a few more decades before actually digging pricey holes to bury the stuff in. If nothing else it allows for generating levies to make paying for the excavations more effective. In the intervening time there might be breakthroughs in affordable reprocessing, economical waste-burning reactor designs get built, winged monkeys might fly out of my butt, whatever.

The problem is that any waste-burning reactors will still have to pay their way by generating electricity at an affordable price even with an offset for the value of destroying some waste. The BN-series reactors the Russians are building and operating and the Chinese are considering buying can burn waste but not a lot of it and they require highly-enriched uranium and plutonium to generate the neutron flux needed. The financial details of how much the existing BN-series reactors cost to run are not transparent.

There's a lot of Powerpoint Warriors in the waste-burning business, not many folks pouring concrete and bending metal. It's the same with proponents of small modular and thorium molten-salt reactors. The financial costs of licencing, building, operating and eventaully decommissioning such paper designs tend not to be emphasised in the flashy slide presentations.