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Honestly, insightful?

From a quick google search on NASA inventions:

Ten NASA inventions you use every day

Top 15 NASA inventions

Polimide Foam

NASA Inventions benefiting our daily lives

Highlights from those links include kidney dialysis, CAT scans, various types of insulation, efficient water purification tech, cordless tools, modern designs of microchips, satellite tech (you know, it deleives a great deal of your communications....), scratch resistant lenses... And there's a *lot* more, a great deal of modern tech comes from NASA is one way or another.

Even if you have a problem with exploration and a search for knowledge and understanding of the universe, you have to admit the space program and its SCIENCE have yielded *massive* results on earth in technology. I'm also pretty sure there were luddites like you when the first ships were being built, the first submarines, the first plans, hell, the first time someone said "I'm going to wander 50 miles that way and see what's there".

From what I understand, the cameras are triggered by motion. If you cross a line while the light is red, you get photographed.

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-driving-safety/safety-regulatory-devices/red-light-camera1.htm

If there are specific areas you'd like to learn about, there's always How Stuff Works (or go directly to the electronics setion.) For example, Ham Radio is covered, as are all the actual components like Resistors.

If there are specific areas you'd like to learn about, there's always How Stuff Works (or go directly to the electronics setion.) For example, Ham Radio is covered, as are all the actual components like Resistors.

If there are specific areas you'd like to learn about, there's always How Stuff Works (or go directly to the electronics setion.) For example, Ham Radio is covered, as are all the actual components like Resistors.

If there are specific areas you'd like to learn about, there's always How Stuff Works (or go directly to the electronics setion.) For example, Ham Radio is covered, as are all the actual components like Resistors.

They can pry my Droid from my cold dead hands.

...using the jaws of life.

The Amateur Radio Relay League is a great spot to start. They are the largest Ham Radio organization in the country.

Another good site with basic info is the How Stuff Works page

These links will give you a good spot to start. Best of luck!

Shift is huge compared to a modern hearing aid. http://www.precisehearing.com/images/dot.jpg (--about 1.5cm along the tan part which goes behind your ear.
http://www.hearingaidscentral.com/Images/Melody_hearing_aid_Arrow.JPG (-- In the ear
http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/hearing-aid-4.jpg -- a tiny one... closer to the shift key on my cellphone.

It may be named for the engine its used in, but Diesel is heavier than gasoline, and is on a completely different tier in the distillation process.

Refining crude into fuels

If this injector can ignite gasoline like diesel, it is not a diesel engine, but does operate like one (as diesel uses a glow plug or high surface igniter instead of a spark)

I know you were joking, but wouldn't it be great if we could trick the virus into attacking itself?

I also feel that there may be promise in DNA Computers, but it sounds like those are way far off. Program the DNA computer to seek and destroy certain cells, and then self-destruct when finished.

I'm rereading TFA, and it's really even more out-there than I thought initially. I thought he was using the "unusual formats" as a metaphor for something, but does he literally mean books with fold-out charts and translucent overlays? Is the point that primitive? Has he not met the computer? Hasn't he ever seen an interactive presentation? I don't even have to go looking for anything specific, just go to HowStuffWorks and pick something. Many Wikipedia articles will do the same thing, except with animations and videos instead of Flash. Isn't this better than a pop-up book?

Obviously NASA has not provided us with anything of value!

http://www.howstuffworks.com/ten-nasa-inventions.htm

By the way. I just Googled this. Took me all of 3 seconds to find something of value that NASA has provided.

Depending on the power line, it's likely the line in TFA was at least 880 volts (what the lines running along the road in a residential area carry), and likely much more. Apparently, New York's subway only runs 625 (here) and DC's Metro trains run 750 V (here). According to this, even a millimeter gap in a conducting stream (like someone's urine) would require around 3000 V to jump it. It's quite likely the pole this guy took down with his car was carrying at least 4000 V (here).

So it looks like the Mythbusters were fine, as far as they went. An electric fence or third rail is very unlikely to be able to electrocute someone through a urine stream because of the air gaps, but there are plenty of electrical transmission lines easily capable of it.

The rareness of gold: I recall reading an approximation of the entire amount of gold ever mined by mankind would allow you to build only one-third of the Washington Monument. http://money.howstuffworks.com/question213.htm

Greenland was colonized during a period of global warmth. That it is why it was named that way. When the solar cycle became colder, Greenland lost population due to global cooling. The climate was not influenced then by Scandinavians driving gas guzzling, CO2 belching SUV's. Man is not powerful enough to change the earth's climate to any "significant" degree. But that big thermonuclear ball in the sky is. A billion petrochemical fueled cars will not influence the sun. But, I still think we should find better sources of energy. Petrochemicals can be very dirty. I think we should only use them for a feedstock for plastics and use Thorium reactors to make our energy. Thorium reactors could even be used to get rid of the deadly nuclear waste from Uranium/Plutonium reactors. http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2009/12/01/how-a-liquid-fluoride-thorium-reactor-lftr-works/ Scientists are men that can be influenced by propaganda just like any man can be. I think the climate change scare is just another way for politicians to steal our hard earned money. BTW, I also love this video from George Carlin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw

I find it a bit hard to believe that the daily cost of presses, press staff and press consumables is equal to or less than the daily cost of web servers. Do you have any numbers to back up your claim? After all, the computers that the advertising, journalism and production staff use are there whether or not you are printing on paper.

This guy says that the cost of printing the New York times is of the order of US$500 million per year. That seems pretty unbelievable too but if true would amount to something like US$1.4 million per day. I looked at the financial statement of the New York times where they list the cost of raw materials for 2006, 2005 and 2004 as (millions US$ per year) 331, 321 and 297.

This site suggests daily paper costs for the New York Times to be about 1/10 of the above estimate. Based on the financial report this is just wrong.

US$1 million per day would run a hell of a server room.

http://history.howstuffworks.com/world-war-ii/the-atomic-bomb-and-the-surrender-of-japan.htm
The Japanese navy had been destroyed in Leyte Gulf. Japan could no longer import the grain, coal, oil, and vital raw materials needed to sustain its war effort because a large part of its merchant marine had been destroyed and because it was under a tight air and sea blockade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketsu_Go
By August 1945, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) had ceased to be an effective fighting force. The only Japanese major warships in fighting order were six aircraft carriers, four cruisers, and one battleship, none of which could be adequately fueled. They could "sustain a force of twenty operational destroyers and perhaps forty submarines for a few days at sea."[20]

http://www.city-data.com/forum/history/223273-what-would-have-happened-if-we.html
"Japan in turn was preparing for the invasion, Ketsu-Go. They had been preparing since 1944. They actually had no shortage of suicide aircraft, thousand of cheap planes, essentially flying bombs. Their plan was to launch massive kamakaze aircraft attacks (from hidden airstrips) at allied vessels to smash the invasion fleet. They estimated they could attack and damage 800 vessels in one strike. If a landing was achieved, the first one in November was aimed at Kyushu, Japan had some 800,000 soldiers to fight. These aren't woman and children, but hard core fanatical soldiers. Organized divisions, tank brigades. etc. They had already stockpiled supplies and ammo. Beyond the beaches, Japan is rocky and mountainous, a natural defendable fort."

---

This was total war. We were already killing civilians. They were killing civilians (and raping them, using them as human batteries/slaves). Both sides were killing without quarter and taking no prisoners.
They didn't understand about fallout (and given chernobyl and the 600ish excess deaths in 60 years - I feel like we grossly overweight fallout risk. Cigarette smoking and driving automobiles during that 1945-2010 have probably produced more deaths than fallout).

---
There's a lot more on Ketsu Go here:
http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/arens/chap4.htm
Note the bit on the Subs.

---

Read the articles. The lives saved were based on calculations from known battles. They were cold bloodedly estimating the casulties per square mile and per day based on what the japanese had already done. The japanese had 15 divisions, in hardened defense positions and pretty much knew exactly where the americans had to land so it was at least as bad as D-day.

"The Battle of Okinawa, the very last pitched battle against Japan, ran up 72,000 casualties in 82 days, of whom 12,510 were killed or missing. (This is conservative, because it excludes several thousand U.S. soldiers who died after the battle indirectly from their wounds.) The entire island of Okinawa is 464 square miles; to take it, therefore, cost the United States 407 soldiers (killed or missing) for every 10 square miles of island.

If the U.S. casualty rate during the invasion of Japan had only been 5 percent as high per square mile as it was at Okinawa, the United States would still have lost 297,000 soldiers (killed or missing)."

I don't really respect our modern politicians and think they are a bunch of lying scumbags. But I do respect those military and political men of world war 2. It was way too serious for the kinds of games we see them playing today.

> or you get 0% from radio..... I wonder why the didn't ban radio?

http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/music-royalties7.htm

As for logic operations per second, my video card can easily do trillions of processes per second, and if 100 trillion is the bar, I am sure that NVIDIA or AMD will cross it in well under a decade.

No, no it can't.

A 1Ghz GPU can process at most 1 billion computational actions per second. Most of those actions require many, some times thousands of cycles. To my knowledge there is no 1000Ghz GPU. I could be wrong on the second part, but I doubt it. Keep in mind that a GPU is just a special purpose CPU.

For more information on how a CPU/GPU works I would start by reading the following article:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/microprocessor.htm

Not really. Something that operate on base 4 is only about twice as power as what we have now. (Just think of groups of two transistors as a single unit, and viola, 4 states.)

100 base 2 = 10000 possible values
100 base 3 = 1000000 possible values
100 base 4 = 100000000 possible values
100 base 5 = 10000000000 possible values.

For each additional base the total possible value is increased by 100. Otherwise known as 2 orders of magnitude more. To ignore any other factors, if we take a Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz processor and make it base 3, it would now be a 300.0Ghz processor, one hundred times "faster".

You sir, fail at math.

Read this.

I'm a nonsmoker.

There are economic advantages to smoking. It seems very silly to ban smoking everywhere, and at the same time keep worrying about the "aging population problem".

1) Smokers tend to die sooner after their productiveness declines. Whereas healthy nonsmokers are more likely to live for 1, or 2 more decades thus using up more resources and still get something just as expensive as lung cancer. Remember eating all that healthy stuff and getting good exercise means you are less likely to get heart disease or a stroke and so you are more likely to die of cancer. You can't avoid death, just postpone it.

2) If you do it right the tobacco taxes more than make up for what they cost (which means they help pay for the nonsmokers like me :) ).

For example: in the UK smoking related problems cost the NHS 5 billion pounds a year. However the tobacco taxes bring in 10 billion pounds a year. Thus UK smokers contribute more than they take out from the system. And it's easier to make smokers pay more in taxes, than to increase income or sales taxes.

By all means educate people about the dangers of smoking, and take measures to prevent nonadults from smoking. But if adults still want to smoke, let them - as long as it doesn't cause stuff to blow up etc.

As for 2nd hand smoke, it's simple: to increase the number of smoke-free places (e.g. restaurants, pubs), just tax places that allow smoking more than those that don't (e.g. require more expensive operating licenses). That way you get increased tax revenue, while maintaining choice. Banning doesn't increase tax revenue at all.

There are lots of unhealthy/risky stuff we do everyday which makes the danger of 2nd hand smoke pale in comparison. Consuming large fries+fizzy sugar water every day will probably kill most people faster than having them breathe in 2nd hand cigarette smoke everyday.

Compare:
http://www.cancer.org/docroot/ped/content/ped_10_2x_secondhand_smoke-clean_indoor_air.asp
http://health.howstuffworks.com/death-by-auto-accident-or-french-fry2.htm

Yes there's a choice to consume fries or not. But with my suggestion (taxing places that allow smoking) there'll also be choice for both nonsmokers AND smokers.

Maybe every year a country should give a posthumous award (The Black Lung?) to the top smokers who died contributing to their country... ;)

So to you smokers out there, "Thanks!"

Not sure what century you ar ein but "drive by wire" is pretty much the current wave of technology. I would expect manual linkage to steering, brakes and all drive train components to be a thing of the past in the VERY near future. Some of the drive train designs being unveiled at the autoshow put an electric motor on every wheel and eliminate mechanical drivetrain altogether.

"People really should learn about the car before they drive it, but this is a monumental fuck-up on the part of Toyota."

But the emergency brake is still by cable and emergency brakes are required by lawn in some areas so they are installed on all vehicles. Why the driver did not pull the ebrake when a passenger had over a minute to call 911 is beyond me, I'm guessing he thought he could regain control over the vehicle so this is still driver error.

If you look at existing (NiMH) battery technology for something like a Toyota Prius, you could expect an 8-year service life (based on the 8-year warranty) with a battery replacement cost of around US$3,000 afterward. And Toyota's saying that their cells are still going strong after 200,000 miles. Mind you, those NiMH cells aren't powering the entire vehicle for the entire trip.

Let's say the newer Li-Air cells will have a similar service life and are twice the cost, so US$6,000 - how much will you be paying in electricity to recharge the cells for 250,000 miles?

De Beers Marketing

1. A diamond is forever.
2. A diamond is a family heirloom.
3. If he truly loves you, he would buy a diamond that costs him 2 months' salary.

Pure genius.

Something I don't get, and is unanswered in general. When the ISS was first assembled back in 1998, it was asserted at the time that this was going to be the first permanent outpost of humanity in space.

Perhaps I'm getting senile in my old age and not remembering things very clearly.

YOU are doing just fine, my friend. Those were my first thoughts reading the TFS. Your post really sparked the old gray cells and I thank you for that. That said, google is my friend, and the fossil record indeed supports the idea that we were promised and sold as taxpayers the idea that this would be a permanent station - I simply googled "iss permanent outpost" and got some interesting stuff right off the bat:

http://www.space.com/common/media/show/player.php?show_id=26&ep=4

http://science.howstuffworks.com/space-station.htm

However, note that in 2000, there came the obscure quote from a NASA mgr - "This is the beginning of what we hope is at least 15 years of continuous human presence in space, and personally, I hope its much, much longer than that that once we get this crew on orbit, well have spacecraft flying with people on board for centuries to come." Source -

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/exp_one_iss_001030.html

Nonetheless, the "permanent outpost" meme was alive and well in 2007 -

http://eu.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=24180

And what's NASA's real plan? Get a load of the roadmap on slide 2 - and the clever glyph at the right end of the ISS bar, showing neither certainty nor commitment -

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/203075main_ECLSS%20Technology%20Exchange%20Conference%20briefing.pdf

I thought a physicist would use the shadow and the angle, or use other techniques listed in: http://science.howstuffworks.com/question379.htm

And a mathematician would just write a paper proving it can be done and how, and another would describe measuring such flagpoles in nonEuclidean space :).

An engineer would just look at it and say "it's roughly about 30 feet or 9 metres" or google for specs for that particular flagpole.

He said the first... I said the second.

---

I've known enough people with talent in my life to believe that motivation only goes so far.

Talent is great. This part you are born with.

Skill is great. This part takes motivation and elbow grease.

Talent + Skill is something entirely different. That's 1% territory.

---

To address the parent's point,
Yes you can die walking down the street. But the odds are much higher ski-diving.

I might white water. I won't ski dive or bungee jump. (Tho I did parasail behind a boat on vacation and it was fun, certainly risked death there).

I downhill ski-- there is risk there but I have a lot more control over the risk- even on a double diamond. The risk is tilted towards broken ligament and away from death.

To be fair:
http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm
The risk of a ski diving fatality in the U.S. is apparently lower than driving a car.

On the other hand:
http://theblueskyranch.com/sta/tb7.htm
"one skydiving death was recorded for every 903 members." (~32,000 members) (1:100,000 jumps)

And the full statement above would be "Making one sky diving jump is about as risky as making 400-600 car driving events).

White water rafting is at .80 deaths: 100,000 person days of whitewater rafting on managed K1 rivers.

I'm not an adrenaline junkey tho-- it makes me feel uncomfortable.

These are sold as "sky diving is low risk" but compare...
http://www.nsaa.org/nsaa/press/0506/facts-about-skiing-and-snowboarding.asp
During the past 10 years, about 38 people have died skiing/snowboarding per year on average. (.80 per million skier/snowboarder (multi day) visits).
i.e. a 13 minute ski run at high speeds puts you at a lot less risk than one sky diving jump.
Also, some of those fatalities were by clear idiots (like the kennedy's playing football while skiing downhill near trees).

The risk of sky diving is lower than I thought (1:5000 jumps) but still high.
To be fair, apparently some sky diving fatalities are also related to idiots who are jumping in bad weather conditions.

http://health.howstuffworks.com/skin-care/cleansing/myths/question692.htm

Clark Gable drove a custom built 1936 Duesenberg Speedster that likely cost him nothing more than the price of a fill-up.

The promotional price to the influential buyer is as old as dirt.

I wanted to say this earlier but stupid Safari 2 crashes on any tries to reply on Slashdot so ..

the clueless Naciremas did this right: diesel emissions are just awful

I doubt it's beneficial to continue that war you guys got going over there. Anyway, the thing is diesel emissions are (or was) worse over there on your side than it is (or was) here.

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/how-clean-diesel-fuel-works1.htm

"Ultra low sulphur diesel fuel has been refined so that its sulphur content is 15 parts per million (ppm) or less. This is 97 percent cleaner than the standard highway-use diesel fuel sold in the US, which contains an average of 500 ppm of sulphur."

"ULSD fuel has been the standard in Europe for several years. In the U.S., the changeover process began in June 2006, when the EPA enacted a mandate requiring 80 percent of the highway diesel fuel produced or imported to meet the 15 ppm standard. The new ULSD fuel went on sale at most stations nationwide in mid-October 2006. Both diesel fuels will be on sale for the next few years, with the goal being a gradual phaseout of 500 ppm diesel. By December 2010, all highway-use diesel fuel offered for sale in the U.S. must be ULSD fuel."

"ULSD fuel will work in concert with a new generation of diesel engines that will begin arriving for the 2007 model year. Ideally, ULSD will enable the new generation of diesel vehicles to meet the same strict emission standards as gasoline-powered vehicles. The new engines will utilize an emissions-reducing device called a particulate filter."

"Diesel engines manufactured for the 2007 model year and later will utilize some type of particulate filter and will be designed to run solely on ULSD fuel."

I don't know when that was written, but it seems like it's a couple of years old and that your modern cars may have caught up.

If your information is newer than that then I stand corrected, if not I think you have to accept that things move on and improve and that old issues don't have to be around longer, and in this case was solved earlier over here.

So if you had (well, if you as a unity) wanted to have cleaner diesels you could have had them earlier to.

This has nothing to do with phones that have built in GPS. All cell tower positions are very accurately measured, and any cell phone in range can be triangulated against these known coordinates.
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gps-phone.htm

When you said "humans only use 1-15% of their brain" I know you meant "at a time". But just in case someone thinks this is the old: Unlock your potential - use the other 90% of your brain, here's a simple explanation: http://health.howstuffworks.com/10-brain-myths10.htm

This is related to the history of argument about the existence of God. Thomas Aquinas made a similar distinction between things which exist and things which don't exist, things which cannot exist and things which just happen not to exist. In this ontological argument he attempts to prove that God logically must exist.

I can prove anything with logic, if I pick the right premises.
The nit-pick about science is the annoying requirement that your premises and conclusion be testable.

That said, we can ascertain whether or not your 3,000 meter tall solid gold badger could logically exist.
Once we look at how much gold has ever been mined, the conclusion is that your badger could not be built.
Such is the joy of having a hypothesis that is testable.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/virus.htm That should give them an idea. It also includes a video about trojan horses. :)

After I read your list of safe states I thought there might be a correlation between snowfall and driving safety- I didn't see MN, WI, ND, SD, MT, AK, or CO (heavy snowfall/ice states) in your list. So I looked around and found this:

http://maps.howstuffworks.com/united-states-annual-snowfall-map.htm

It looks like there is more to this than just snow, since several of the safest states have pretty decent snowfall. I did notice a stricking lack of 'warm' states on the safe list; with the exception of GA, none of the states that are mostly or wholly in the tan "less than 8 inches" band across the southern US made it onto the list.

This map of population density:
http://www.census.gov/popest/gallery/maps/popdens-2008.html

shows that most of the safer states have fairly low population densities (NJ being the exception). More specific maps showing population centers would be helpful. However, many of the 'less safe' states also have very low population densities as well.

Perhaps there's an actuary here on /. who could tie all this together?

-b

Yeah.. "nothing of value" http://science.howstuffworks.com/ten-nasa-inventions.htm

Sure dimmers used to just use a variable resistor, but a good while ago nearly all moved onto a bit more of a complex (and efficient) solution: turning the bulb on and off real fast - varying how long the 'on' period is for the dimness factor.

Enabling that lovely buzzing noise they sometimes make.
See here and here for more info

Read.

Li-ion batteries are not as durable as nickel metal hydride or nickel-cadmium designs,[citation needed] and can be extremely dangerous if mistreated. They may explode if overheated or if charged to an excessively high voltage.

A) Remove the battery. B) Place the battery inside a cold storage unit.
 
  Further reading.

Last time I saw this, it was part of GM's Autonomy program which had the additional goal of separating the car's chassis for it's base aka the skateboard. Autonomy used a drive-by-wire wheel, but did away w/ the foot controls. I vaguely recall having seen evidence that this move improved driver reaction time; something about one mode of reaction (hand controls only) out performing two modes of reaction (foot & hand), but I can't dig up the details.

thus additional pros:
ability to radically redefine chassis
improved safety (provided I'm recalling correctly)

Yeah nothing that NASA has done has affected your life in the positive. Lets just wait for private enterprise to go there.
The only reason private enterprise is able to *think about* real space travel is because they are using the ~40 years of NASA knowledge and research.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/ten-nasa-inventions.htm
Ok so this is really basic, but also aerogel, and a laundry list of other things.

Being on Mars is really cool, and we have learned a lot about it. But as for usefulness it tells us maybe mining Mars wouldn't be that profitable (but did we know that before). But all the stuff they used to get to Mars, that shit trickels down FAST. I mean I personally believe that SSDs on the rovers are wat put them into the main stream. They lasted in a super harsh enviroment orders of magnitude longer than they were supposed to. So keep thinking all NASA produces is cool photos.

So if you do something bad, but do it a lot, it becomes normal and acceptable?

YES as per Nike.

Here are image links:

Fan Screws
Wood Screws

http://science.howstuffworks.com/lrad.htm
Scroll to the bottom, it talks about normal and Maximum mode (with override)

http://science.howstuffworks.com/lrad2.htm
Please just read the first paragraph.

The military version that i used has a Key that unlocks maximum. The version the police has is configured differently but has the same safeguards. The system won't go to harmful levels unless unlocked.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/lrad.htm
Scroll to the bottom, it talks about normal and Maximum mode (with override)

http://science.howstuffworks.com/lrad2.htm
Please just read the first paragraph.

The military version that i used has a Key that unlocks maximum. The version the police has is configured differently but has the same safeguards. The system won't go to harmful levels unless unlocked.

Nuclear power could run the process that would make fuel from Mars!

http://videos.howstuffworks.com/tlc/30786-destination-mars-making-fuel-from-mars-atmosphere-video.htm

Rocket motors don't require an atmosphere at all. Is just mass moving and action/reaction. Any sort of device that can chuck mass out the back of a vehicle will push that vehicle forward.

So, even with this fundamentally implausible drive method, we still need to carry nearly 7 times as much fuel as mass of the rest of the ship.

Is that necessarily a big issue?

If we go back to matter+anti-matter reactions, you'd need some matter to annihilate. Any human expedition will have to carry food and water in large quantities, and if we can annihilate the human waste directly, we can save weight on toilet facilities. If we use large amounts of water as a shield against radiation, we get "free" radiation shielding and drinking water in one, and our fuel store just ended up having two extra functions = more weight reduction. Well, water used as radiation shielding is probably a lot heavier than something like lead.

At decent temperatures (the ones we'd need for human habitation in the ship) water is very easy to transport as well, so there are no need for highly complicated fuel pipelines. Can be done with very lightweight plastics built directly into the plumbing systems.

I'm sure there are lots of other ways you could cut down on the weight requirements as well.

One thing that confuses me a little bit, is that if you reduce the acceleration to 50g and up the travel time to 12 days you still end up with a delta_v of 5.1 e8. That way we can keep halving and doubling and ending up with constantly having that much energy.

Using the Motion Example from Hyper Physics, I get some rather different numbers:
Halfway distance (where you need to turn around) is 2,143,589,742,000 meters.
Initial velocity: 0 m/s
Acceleration: 982 m/s^2
That solves for time = 66,073.92 seconds (18 hours, 21 minutes, 13.92 seconds)
Final velocity: 64,884,591.80 m/s (21.64% of the speed of light)

If we change it to 30 m/s^2 (just over 3 g) we solve for v_max = 11,340,872.3 m/s (3.78% of c) and time 4 days, 9 hours, 1 minute.

At 9.82 m/s^2 we get 7 days, 15 hours, 32 minutes and v_max = 660,739.2 m/s (0.22% of c).

At those speeds even 1 g would be sufficient. We can easily pack enough food etc. to last for a 3 month expedition into space. How Stuff Works says ~400 kg food and 1,500 litres of water per person for a 2 year expedition. If we're doing 3 months total (2 months on Pluto, 14 days out, 14 days back) you'd only need about 250 kg of food per person. That's a tiny amount.

If we use your formulas again:
I = Isp*Mr = 3e8*Mr kg m/s

3e8*Mr = (0.5*Mr + Ms)*660,739.2*2 (*2 as we have to slow down again)
Mr = (0.5*Mr + Ms)*660,739.2 m/s*2/c
Mr = (0.5*Mr + Ms)*0.0044
907.44 Mr = 0.5 Mr + Ms
907 Mr = Ms

Now we're down to carrying 1.2 kg of fuel for every ton of spaceship for the improbable type of drive. Up that to a 1:1 ratio and I think something like fusion becomes readily attainable? 2 tonne of fuel to 1 ton of spaceship would probably considered an insane leap forward.

But, again, this is something I only have very little knowledge about, and I know that most of that is probably incorrect. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if I screwed up the calculations. I'm just a very curious kind of guy :D

Been out for a few years...
http://science.howstuffworks.com/transparent-aluminum-armor.htm