South Korea successfully launches home-grown Nuri space rocket after failed attempt last year

[MH.Yang]

Uh, Japan has used its yen to exchange to US dollars to buy foreign materials.

Same for China, with yuan, except it can skip the dollar.

If Japan does not have foreign trade, if Japan cannot provide the goods needed by other countries. Then no country will accept their currency.

 

[REhorror]

If Japan does not have foreign trade, if Japan cannot provide the goods needed by other countries. Then no country will accept their currency.

Who said Japan does not have foreign trade? In high growth era, Japan has a strong domestic market and it also has foreign trade, it's not mutually exclusive.

Foreign-exchange reserves of China - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

China does hold japanese yen as part of foreign exchange reserves too, btw.

 

[MH.Yang]

Who said Japan does not have foreign trade? In high growth era, Japan has a strong domestic market and it also has foreign trade, it's not mutually exclusive.

Foreign-exchange reserves of China - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

China does hold japanese yen as part of foreign exchange reserves too, btw.

That is Japan still has enough foreign exchange as guarantee now, not in the future.

As the trade deficit widens, Japan's foreign exchange reserves will not last long. The Japanese govt has sold U.S. debt for seven consecutive months to obtain U.S. dollars to save the yen exchange rate. Sell U.S. debt when the U.S. dollar raises interest rates, LOL.

Of course, Japan will still be able to obtain some foreign exchange in the future. What I said is that Japan needs enough foreign exchange to meet its demand for external resources. Need enough foreign exchange!

 

[jamahir]

North Korea placed its first and second Earth observation satellites into orbit in 2012 and 2016 though there is no proof that either one has ever transmitted spaced-based imagery and data back home.

Those North Korean launches invited United Nations economic sanctions because they were viewed as covers for testing the country’s banned long-range missile technology.

Lovely ! North Korea is sanctioned for launching a space launch vehicle but USA military is not sanctioned for launching military rockets including testing ICBMs.

Just like the Soviet Union gave up transistors when it had an advantage in tubes, the Soviet Union got the wrong tech tree.

The vacuum tube computer concept is seeing a resurgence. NASA finds the concept useful for space applications because it seems the vacuum tube transistor is inherently radiation-tolerant :

The vacuum tube strikes back: NASA’s tiny 460GHz vacuum transistor that could one day replace silicon FETs​

• By Sebastian Anthony on June 24, 2014 at 8:12 am

Way back in the salad days of digital computing (the 1940s and ’50s), computers were made of vacuum tubes — big, hot, clunky devices that, when you got right down to it, were essentially glorified light bulbs. This is why early computers like the ENIAC weighed more than 27 tons and consumed more power than a small town. Later, obviously, vacuum tubes would be replaced by probably the greatest invention of all time — the solid-state transistor — which would allow for the creation of smaller, faster, cheaper, and more reliable computers. Fast forward to 2014, though, and the humble CMOS field-effect transistor (FET) is starting to show its age. We’ve pretty much hit the limit on shrinking silicon transistors any further, and they can’t operate at speeds much faster than a few gigahertz. Which is why NASA’s Ames Research Center is going back to the future with its new vacuum transistor — a nanometer-scale vacuum tube that, in early testing, has reached speeds of up to 460GHz.


The original vacuum tube triode, the main building block of early computers, consists of three separate elements inside a glass bulb. You have a cathode in the middle, which emits electrons; a grid around the cathode; and an anode around the outside. When a voltage is applied to the grid, electrons flow freely across the vacuum from the cathode to the anode. It is functionally identical to how a modern-day solid-state transistor works (a gate that controls the flow of electricity from source to drain). The main problem, though, was that the cathode had to be heated up by a filament so that it would emit electrons — and where there’s heat, there’s a lot of power consumption and a lot wear and tear. As you may know, it wasn’t unusual for old tube-based computers to break down every few hours whenever a tube burnt out.

So, anyway, the high running costs and frustrations of operating a tube-based computer were eventually assuaged by the discovery of processes that allowed for the cheap and plentiful production of integrated circuits with solid-state MOSFETs. And, in the last 40 years or so, we haven’t looked back. Until now.


Standard MOSFET vs. vacuum-channel transistor [Image credit: IEEE Spectrum]

NASA’s Ames Research Center has been working on-and-off for many years on the vacuum-channel transistor, which is essentially a vacuum tube that can be fabricated using conventional CMOS techniques. Instead of a gate sitting between the source and drain, there is… nothing. A vacuum. By a method known as field emission, electrons are drawn across the vacuum from the source to the drain when a current is applied to the gate (see diagram). By using field emission rather than the thermionic (hot) electron emission, these vacuum-channel transistors don’t require a heat source. Importantly, they also don’t require a vacuum — instead they use helium (it’s sparse enough that the electrons have almost no chance of bumping into helium atoms while they traverse the few-nanometer gap between source and drain). The electrons also traverse the air gap a lot faster than if they had to pass through the gate electrode.


A collection of early triode vacuum tubes (Click to zoom in)

All in all, these vacuum-channel transistors, crazy as they sound, are surprisingly feasible. They can be fabricated using existing processes. The helium packaging is tougher, but the NASA researchers think that the techniques used to package current microelectromechanical sensors (gyroscopes, accelerometers) should be suitable for their unorthodox transistors as well. In early testing, a vacuum-channel transistor was able to operate at 460GHz — on the order of 10 times faster than a conventional, silicon-based FET (and comparable to the speeds that a graphene transistor might operate at). There’s no word on whether these vacuum-channel transistors will allow for the creation of small, modern audio amplifiers that sound like original tube amps — but maybe!

Moving forward, NASA is faced with the usual stumbling block that all new bleeding-edge technologies face: It’s built a single vacuum-channel transistor in the lab, and now it’s time to try and build large number of them on a single chip. The NASA researchers sound fairly positive about their chances — but really, until they actually get down to it, who knows what issues they might run into? In any case, add vacuum-channel transistors to the rather awesome (and rapidly growing) list of potential methods of pushing past the theoretical limits of silicon.
[Image credit: Kurt Faler]

@fitpOsitive @RealNapster

 

[REhorror]

That is Japan still has enough foreign exchange as guarantee now, not in the future.

As the trade deficit widens, Japan's foreign exchange reserves will not last long. The Japanese govt has sold U.S. debt for seven consecutive months to obtain U.S. dollars to save the yen exchange rate. Sell U.S. debt when the U.S. dollar raises interest rates, LOL.

Of course, Japan will still be able to obtain some foreign exchange in the future. What I said is that Japan needs enough foreign exchange to meet its demand for external resources. Need enough foreign exchange!

Japan currently has the most US govt bond on the market, even more than China.

If it was me, I would sell all of it to buy gold, like Russia.

Too bad, again, political vassalage. I say with confident that if Japan ousts right wing Abe, it will regrow immediately.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

I know that Japan started producing so-called hybrid vehicles as early as 1999, which was in line with the trend of environmental protection topics that were popular in the West, especially the United States. Many Westerners, especially Americans who advertised themselves as progressives with environmental protection concepts, bought Japanese hybrid vehicles. powered car.
But IMHO, that car is not really environmentally friendly at all, nor does it really use electricity as an energy source, it's just a business gimmick.
I recently saw a news that a Chinese battery manufacturer has recently developed a battery that can last a car up to 1,000 kilometers. If this effect can be achieved, all-electric vehicles will replace oil vehicles on a large scale within ten years, at least in China, where energy is scarce.

I have often repeated all this excitement over a company's increased Hybrid sales is nothing to be happy about. Hybrids have been around for over 20 years and yes they obviously do sell but 100% electric EV is where companies should be focused on because that segment's sales are going through the roof as the tech these previous early Hybrid adopters are likely to move to in the future. So while in some markets the Hybrid to EV ratio may be currently 2 to 1 that actually to me sounds like a percentage decline as the EVs are catching up quick.

Even this bodes the future:

Global EV sales overtake hybrid cars for first time in 2021

Chinese, European demand helps drive worldwide sales to 4.6m units

asia.nikkei.com

Global EV sales overtake hybrid cars for first time in 2021​

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

I suggest that the Japanese vigorously develop the AV industry. They are still very strong in this field. Most importantly, China will never enter this industry.

The AV market of the 1980's is dead. It was killed by stereo televisions and digital mp3 players.

Even television is dying with people simply watching things online with their computers.