I think it's pretty amazing that spacecraft can survive at all out there, given the sort of particles flying around - individual cosmic rays with the energy of fast-pitch baseballs. Thankfully, particles with such high energy have tiny cross sections (they prefer to move through matter rather than interact with it), and when they do hit something and create a shower of particles, most of the progeny is likewise super-high energy and will most likely just move through whatever it's in.

It's more interesting when they strike the atmosphere - each collision creates a new shower of other high energy particles, more and more, spreading out the energy as they descend. In the end, detectors on the surface over an area of dozens of square kilometers simultaneously pick up different pieces of the same cascade kicked off by a single cosmic ray collision.

No, fines for violating export laws.

Being slapped with massive fines is usually pretty good motivation for a company. And given that the US spends nearly half of the world's total military spending, and the EU a good chunk of the rest, simply "hopping overseas" and choosing to serve other markets isn't exactly the smartest of plans, financially.

It's idiodic for a company to wilfully risk sales of hundreds of thousands of units per year to NATO to sell a couple hundred units to Russia. Russia's economy is barely bigger than Canada's. And less than 80% the size of Brazil's.

You could start by reading more than the first paragraph.

1) They don't have "zero" capability, but they have way too little - only a few hundred modern imagers.

2) They have tried to buy them off ebay before. And it led to arrests. It's illegal to export military-grade night vision equipment without a license, and apparently sites like ebay are well monitored for potential violations.

The only problem with an electric auxillary motor is that it would take a ton of power and I'm not sure the battery size/weight to get any meaningful runtime out of it would be at all practical.

One thing that I have seen that seems 'new' and might make an electric motor work are variable-speed diesel DC generators. They feed some kind of DC-DC converter/charge controller to provide a fixed DC voltage that can charge batteries or feed an inverter and could probably supply DC to the motor, too, although I haven't seen the converters for 48vdc.

Supposedly they're extremely efficient as they have the electrical generation built into the flywheel, so there's no mechanical losses from a belt or shaft driven generator. Because the charge controller is setup to convert a wide range of DC voltage to a fixed voltage, the engine can be run at varying speeds depending on electrical need, rather than requiring a fixed RPM required to generate AC power. Battery charging can happen at low speeds for improved fuel efficiency. I think they also enable the use of very small diesel engines, saving space.

At least this way you could have one IC engine that does both generation and could act as a power source for a motor. With enough battery, docking and exiting marinas could be done on battery alone. And you'd only need one IC engine for electrical power and auxillary propulsion.

Yeah, but they "cheat" a lot - for example, Belarus has made a mint serving as a reshipping platform for European goods. And for some reason they left Iceland off their list even though we supported the sanctions against them. Still, it's caused major food price inflation (unsurprisingly). Seems kind of a weird way to punish Europe, it seems obvious it's going to have a lot more effect at home than abroad - Russia's trade in food goods with Europe makes up far more of its imports than Europe's trade in food goods with Russia makes up of its exports. But I guess they didn't have a lot of options for "retaliation". I mean, Gazprom is already nearly going broke as it is, turning off the spigots would have rapidly ensured that it did. Oil and gas make up half of their government budget and 2/3rds of their exports - it'd sure punish Europe, but it'd also be economic suicide.

I think they're really hoping that the sanctions will just expire and they'll be able to go back to raking in western capital again. Because if they don't expire, barring some huge unexpected oil price surge, those reserve funds are going to dry up. They expect it to be down to under $40B by the end of this year. What they're going to do when it runs out, I have no clue. They need dollars and euros to buy the goods that their undersized industrial sector can't manufacture. China's a help but not a solution; they don't have the lending power of the US or EU to begin with, and their goal seems to be more exploiting Russia over the situation than offering friendly aid. For example, they got Russia to agree to the cutthroat rates on the proposed "Power Of Siberia" pipeline that they'd been trying to get for years and to let them own greater than 50% stakes on fields inside Russia. They got Russia to sell them their most advanced air defense system despite the objections of the defense industry over concerns that China would do what they always do with new technology - reverse engineer it and then produce it domestically. But who else are they going to turn to? China's basically becoming Russia's "loan shark". And at the end of the day, if it came down to it and China had to chose between the Russian market and the 20-fold larger market of the US and EU? It's not even a contest.

I figured they'd tackle something more ambitious than that with their drone offerings - a drone that (barring instructions to do otherwise) follows you around whatever you're doing and keeps the camera on you, trying to get the most epic shots. E.g., you bungee jump off a bridge, it races you to the bottom, keeping whatever distance and filming style you told it to.

But maybe it's just another remote control drone.

So you mean get rid of wide-character encodings and only use UTF-8 where unicode characters are needed? I agree. :)

I guess it's a question of word choice.

  I think post-apocalyptic means after an apocalyptic event, usually a singular catastrophe like a nuclear war or other major event that has a massive scale and results in multiple and total systemic failures. TRW, MM3, MMFR are all literal post-apocalyptic because they imply or are directly the result of a war.

I think MM1 was "pre-apocalyptic" because there hadn't been a specific singular event yet there was something of a social, political and economic crisis happening concurrent with the storyline. Police service hadn't completely ended, just shrunk in scope and effectiveness. Fuel and other economic goods had become more scarce but not wholly unavailable and the social order was threatened but not totally broken down.

Probably not the greatest terminology, but it kind of seemed to fit better than "critical decline" or something similar, at least in comparison to films that mostly claimed to be sequels which took place after an apocalyptic crisis brought on by the declines seen in the first film.

But that's the point. If it slams into an immobile object of course. But we're not talking about anything slamming into an immobile object. From the perspective of a molecule in the gas stream, it's going about the same speed as its neighbors. It's quite cool.

As for the boundary region, even at the "pinched" funnel outlet one could be talking dozens of kilometers here. A dozen kilometers between going from zero velocity and 25 kilometers per second is roughly the same as a dozen meters between going from zero velocity and 25 meters per second. Aka, a virtually insignificant gradient.

UTF-8 is an encoding of unicode, so I'm totally not getting your "Actually I think "Unicode strings" should be avoided completely."

As a person who spends a significant amount of their time planning my fantasy boat, it looks like in terms of equipment selection, 12v and 24v seem to be kings with much less choice once you get to 48vdc.

Now this is mostly for recreational boats up to about 50'. The larger vessels seem to be more inclined to support 24v because they have the space for larger battery arrays and more flexibility to support 12v runs for the many accessories that only run on 12v.

The more run of the mill boats seem to be exclusively 12v because they have less space for battery arrays, their engines are default setup for 12v alternators.

But even when you get into larger trawler-type cruisers, they may have 24v or even 48v arrays, but that mostly seems to be because almost every appliance they have is 115vac and they're just looking for power efficiency when they're not running off the generator anyway.

No, I don't see it as in issue for anybody.

Every iPhone I buy has been used *hard* for two years by two busy professionals working as consultants, and then used continuously as a home telephone (we kept our landline number and ported it to a cell number because it was actually cheaper than the monthly taxfest that is a landline) and then used pretty hard by a 10 year old boy after that.

I may buy a new iPhone every year, but every one of those iPhones gets used for four years and by then it's not even a question of battery that's an issue, but of software and processor obsolescence for any kind of a serious tasks, and I don't think that's really all that different for Android users, either. The only hardware issue I've ever had was a volume up button on a 4S that crapped out six months in, and it was swapped out in store for a replacement phone in 10 minutes.

I really don't understand guys like you that are so angry about people who do buy a phone every year. Admittedly the biggest "feature" add on year on year is mostly CPU/RAM, although the screen size bump with the iPhone 6 Plus has been the main thing this year. It's a fucking tax writeoff for us and even if we bought 2-3 phones individually we'd be looking at upgrades every 18 months or so anyway, so one every 12-14 months doesn't seem outrageous.

I sometimes think the hostility is because you're too broke, too cheap or just flat-out jealous.

I don't know that I totally buy into that, but I guess far enough to see "Mad Max" as a character concept that George Miller keeps making a series of seemingly related movies about.

What seems unfortunate, though, is that there's never been any real narrative or story developed after Mad Max I. RW and FR are highly entertaining movies, but they're just chase movies with outlandish costuming. Fast and Furious has more character development.

I'll be slightly less abrasive than above, but my experience with the "non replaceable" battery in every iPhone since 3GS is that battery failure has been a non-issue.

I buy a new iPhone every year, pass my old one to my wife, and her now "old" phone becomes our house phone, and the "old" house phone becomes an iPod for my son on trips.

So by the time it gets to iPod status it has been used as a daily phone with frequent charging (me), abusive charging (my wife lets hers get down to 10-20% constantly and doesn't charge in the car, etc), sitting in a charging dock, on, for a solid year as the house phone and then getting used intermittently by my son. It still seems to hold a reasonable charge -- he uses it constantly during a 3 hour plane ride and then more still after we get off the plane without any complaints of short battery life.

I don't really see the "non replaceable" battery as an issue. Even when I had a replaceable battery phone, I only just swapped batteries at home. The few times I decided to haul a battery around with me, I use it so infrequently that it was half discharged by the time I needed it.

If you suck down so much battery during normal use and can't charge off a computer or socket, any of the LiO USB chargers would be fine or even one of the battery cases.

I don't think Apple wants to be in the car manufacturing business with a car of their own anymore than they want to be in the PC and smartphone manufacturing business. With consumer electronics, though, you only have to be in the design business (and only partially, since they buy a lot of technology from someone else -- AFAIK, they don't design display panels, radio chipsets, flash memory, RAM, etc).

With cars, though, there's not really a contract manufacturer who does the assembly, you have to do that yourself although you can buy a lot of parts from OEMs like Bosch and others.

I think Apple sees a way to become a marquis branded supplier to other car makers. Building an "Apple Car" is a design exercise, a way to see how what they do can be applied to electric cars and I'm sure it has a lot to do with dashboard electronics and "user interface" as much as it does with anything else. There may also be less sexy opportunities in terms of what they know about battery management.