Compare the cost of getting a court order to block a site, and the cost of the site switching domain name and IP address. Then they just need secondary sites, like torrentfreak, to list what the site is called this week.
Given that this asteroid masses 50 million tons or so, its too *early* to capture this asteroid. In any case it has a very different orbit, so the velocity required is higher than other targets. In space, physically close is not as important as velocity required.
Object 2000 UG11 is a better candidate, but even that is too massive (10 million tons). So an early mission will more likely scrape some of the loose material off the surface, put it in a big container, and haul that back. With a high efficiency plasma thruster, you can get back 20-50 times your fuel burned. By separating out some of the oxygen in the rocks, you can use that for future trips, making the mining self-sustaining in fuel. Getting the oxygen out is fairly easy by "pyrolysis". Simply focus sunlight on a closed container, and at a high enough temperature some of the rock oxides decompose to O2. Pump that away, and more will decompose to maintain chemical equilibrium.
That article is fundamentally flawed. It points to 2.3% per year increase in energy use in the US and ignores the population growth over the same period. In fact energy use per person has remained around 12 kW since about 1970. Homes are larger, but they are also better insulated. Vehicles and industry are more efficient. So while total energy use has gone up, energy per person has plateaued. If population growth in the US stopped, so would total energy use.
Now, world population is expected to level out around 10 billion. If everyone used energy at the USA rate, that would require 120 TW, or 8 times what we use today. The question is where can you get that much, and what are the side effects?
First, I dare you to design coal-powered cars and airplanes.
That was done 30 years ago. The Boeing Air Launched Cruise Missile (ALCM) used a kerosine/coal slurry fuel. Increasing fuel energy extends the range of the missile. Coal is nearly twice the density of kerosine, so even though it has slightly less energy per weight, it has a higher energy per volume. So they mixed finely ground coal in with the kerosine, but not to the point it would not pump.
Fuel is a good candidate to launch with a high-g device, but a mass driver is not the most economical way to get it off the Earth. It is fairly easy to show that a pipe will cost less per foot than induction coils and a frigging huge power supply to feed it, for the same job of accelerating a projectile. Generally, these type of devices are called "hypervelocity guns", defined as when the muzzle velocity is hypersonic (ie more than Mach 5 or 1500 m/s). This is roughly twice the muzzle velocity of large military guns.
In 1993 I was the study manager at Boeing for using a large gun to deliver fuel to a depot, which then was used to send communications satellites to GEO. The savings was you needed 75% less conventional rocket to launch the satellite dry. Hypervelocity guns are not new, they have been used for ballistic and re-entry testing for about 40 years now. NASA owns several of them. Mainly they need scaling up and "industrializing" - setting them up for regular operations, rather than research use.
To reach the highest muzzle velocity, you want to use the lightest gas (Hydrogen), and heat it, so the speed of sound is as high as possible. Speed of sound is the same as speed of pressure waves in the gas, and when your projectile exceeds that speed, there is no way for the gas at the back end to affect the projectile any more, because it outruns the pressure waves. So the gun gets very inefficient at that point. To make hot hydrogen, it is easiest to store it at room temperature in pressure tanks, then run it through a heat exchanger before it gets to the barrel. There is nothing that goes "boom" like a small gun, it's closer to natural gas pipeline operations (in fact, we sourced the gun barrel from a pipeline maker in the study). Find a suitable mountain, such as Cayembe in Ecuador (the highest point on the equator, and the right slope), and put a 2 km long x 60 cm I.D. pipe pointing up. Load a 600 kg projectile about 4 meters long into it, and it will accelerate at 900 g's, and come out with a muzzle velocity of around 5600 m/s. You lose around 1 km/s of that to air drag, and then use an onboard rocket to finish getting to orbit. Net payload to orbit is around 100 kg, which does not sound like much, but if your launcher is at the equator, you can potentially launch 15 times a day to a single depot destination. Over the course of a year that comes to 550 tons (minus downtime for maintenance).
For launching people and delicate cargo, Hawaii is the best location. Assume a 20 km pipe x 10 m diameter, pushing a 500 ton vehicle. It works out the pressure in the barrel needs to be 2 atmospheres (200kPa, 30 psi). That gives you 3 g's acceleration, safe for humans and satellite parts. Muzzle velocity is 1100 m/s (Mach 3.6), which is not a huge fraction of orbit velocity, but a nice running start before you light up your on-board rocket. Given those starting conditions, a reuseable non-cryogenic rocket should have a payload of around 35 tons, which along with a 10 meter diameter should be plenty for any cargo or people you want to launch. This is the upper end of what you might want to build, for your first low-g cargo launcher you can go a lot smaller.
What I regret is that Ghaddafi could not be interrogated by neutral agencies - say at The Hague. He had close relationships with the IRA, various Palestinian terrorist groups, and very interesting relationships with major oil companies. Now we cannot find out who he worked with, what bribes he paid, and what other crimes he and his government had committed.
He had lots of people working for him, and there is likely paperwork floating around his former government's offices. So there are people to question and document trails to follow, even though he is gone. I expect it will be a few years before the facts come out though, as the new government is starting completely from scratch, and is more concerned with getting basic infrastructure working than criminal justice.
The logical answer is not to start until your trip time is short enough that a later, faster ship is likely to pass you. That means push propulsion development until it appears to stall. For example, if you can do 10% of the speed of light, that comes to a 43 year trip to Alpha Centauri. If it looks like you can increase performance to 11% within 4 years, keep working, cause that will cut 4 years off the trip time, and more for any longer trip. If it looks like you can't, go ahead and launch. Given that current technology can give us maybe 0.1% of lightspeed at best, leading to a 430 year trip, for the moment the answer is keep working.
He ignored some key technologies that will make Space more accessible, such as a combination of robotic, automated, and remote controlled machines sent *before* the people, to prepare the way. For example, iron-bearing meteorites have pummeled the Lunar surface since forever. So around 0.2% of the ground up rock (regolith) there is bits of iron. All you need to extract it is a magnet. So send a solar powered rover around the lunar surface, sifting out the smaller rock particles, running them past a magnet, and saving the part the magnet attracts. Then run back to your future moonbase location and dump the bucket of iron enriched rocks. Repeat as many times as needed.
Your second machine has a large concentrating dish to focus sunlight, and some manipulator arms to smooth the ground and make slight depressions and grooves. Spread your enriched material over them and focus the sunlight, and you will end up with iron plates and bars. Your third machine has manipulator arms to hold the plates and bars in the right places, another concentrating dish, and articulating mirrors to direct the beam of concentrated sunlight at odd angles. That heats and welds the plates and bars to each other, to make whatever structures you want for habitats, etc.
Taking this kind of approach, by the time the first humans get there, the Moonbase can be mostly built and operating. There may have been 50 or 100 machines running around on their own or by remote control doing various jobs for a few years to get ready, and they will continue to work once the people are there, helping them out, and expanding the base. Places like the Moon have raw materials, and lots of energy from sunlight, and that's all you need to get started.
A better example is Haas Automation ( http://www.haascnc.com/home.asp ), where they use robots and machine tools to make more robots and machine tools. 3D printers are not set up to remove the finished parts and start the next one (at least not the home hobbyist ones). We are heading in the direction of "replicators" though, as automation improves. I don't think it will be one machine like a 3D printer that does everything. It will be a combination of a number of machines that working together can produce all of their own parts and then assemble them.
Fry's Electronics Retail Store Return/Exchange Privileges
1. For a refund or exchange, most products may be returned within 30 days of original purchase date. Some other products, such as notebook computers, netbooks, tablets and iPads, desktop computers, monitors, MP3 players and iPods, memory, microprocessors, motherboards, network-attached storage, CD and DVD recorders, camcorders, digital cameras, projectors, and air conditioners (IF UNUSED) may be returned within 15 days of original purchase date.
Today's announcement that Google is shutting down several services highlights one of the risks of the "Cloud". Your service provider can decide to shut down, and you have no control over it. My approach, rather, is to keep the primary copy of my data locally. I use the Cloud for backup, and when I want to share data with other people, or myself when I am mobile. Depending on the Cloud for something critical is very risky unless you have a written contract with your provider to keep the service going.
GPS satellites are in a 12 hour orbit, which is fairly high up. That also puts them in the middle of the Van Allen radiation belts. If I remember correctly, they are hardened to about a MegaRad, partly to survive their normal orbit conditions, and partly to survive nuclear effects. So yes, they would survive the start of a nuclear war, it's part of the design requirements.
A nuclear sub's job is to get lost on the ocean. That means to sit quietly underwater so nobody can find it. Coming up to the surface to get a GPS fix defeats that job. Getting your fix just before launching is OK, since you have to surface anyway to launch. ICBMs have used inertial navigation since they first came into use. The accuracy of hitting the target is mostly governed by the accuracy of knowing the launch point. Star finders only tell you which way you are looking. They tell you nothing about your trajectory.
No, who is Lazlo? We did find the slightly radioactive basement of the Physics building, coffin shaped tunnels that led to the site of a satanic ritual, the second level, and a door to nowhere.
This was Columbia University, in Manhattan. Pupin Hall, the physics building, is where some of the first nuclear experiments were done. It's why the Manhattan Project was called the Manhatten Project. Besides having physicists able to work on the project, the utility tunnels linking buildings on campus made it easier to hide they were doing something important there. They would deliver stuff to other buildings, and cart them to Pupin out of sight through the tunnels.
Before Columbia bought the property, it was the site of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. The coffin shaped tunnels were how they transported patients between buildings, out of sight of decent Victorian age people, and hard to escape because the tunnels were just barely big enough for a person to fit. Those tunnels were still there, randomly intersecting with the newer consruction. One of them dead ended in a basement of a no longer existing building, which is where we found the melted candles and pentagram painted on the wall. Likely it was the site of a fraternity initiation.
The second level was the coal delivery system. The University had a steam plant, which is how the buildings were heated. It was centrally located, so the coal from the delivery trucks was transported about 1.5 city blocks from the hole they dumped it into to the bunkers near the furnaces via underground rail carts. These were underneath all the other tunnels.
The door to nowhere was your standard metal door set in a metal frame found in many commercial buildings, which opened onto...a blank block wall. This being Manhattan, the campus buildings are close together, and tunnels for all the utility lines makes maintenance a whole lot easier. My guess is this door was for future expansion to a building that had not been built at the time (late 1970's). Yes, we played Dungeons and Dragons in it's original paper and funny dice form, so it was natural to explore the campus tunnels to see how many places we could go and where they led.
Inspection of the atomic masses of nickel, copper, and hydrogen isotopes will tell you if any of the possible reactions are exothermic. If none are, the Rossi device would violate conservation of energy. If there are any possible reactions, that narrows down what to investigate.
It's not new physics at all, if you read the patent application. Nuclear reactions are a well understood part of physics.
What he is claiming is fusion of Nickel and Hydrogen to make Copper. A simple inspection of the Periodic Table shows that much is plausible since Copper is one place higher, and adding a proton moves you up one place. Next you would look at the accurate atomic weights. When you do hot fusion, such as Deuterium + Tritium = Helium + proton, If you sum the atomic weights of the starting materials, they are slightly more than the atomic weights of the products. The difference shows up as energy via Einstein's well known formula. So the question is for the Rossi reaction, what are the atomic weights of source and products? Without knowing the exact isotopes involved, I can't say, but someone can check all the possible combinations and see if any of them could be net energy producers.
If none are, then his patent application is invalid, as it would violate conservation of energy. If the device appears to work, it must be by some other method, or a fraud. If there are some candidate nuclear reactions with positive energy output, the next question is how does the proton in the Hydrogen atom get to the Nickel nucleus? Atomic nuclei are positively charged and tend to repel each other. If you can overcome the repulsion and get them close enough, the strong and weak nuclear forces can take over and bind them together. In hot fusion that is done by heating them to millions of degrees so they are moving very fast, and can get close before the repulsion brings them to a stop. In cold fusion there would have to be some catalyst or quantum effect. I'm not qualified to speak on that, but perhaps some nuclear physicist could.
Take a look at the big island of Hawaii. On the west side you have a nearly constant slope formed by lava flows. You can build a "space gun" there with a barrel d = 20 km long. Assume you want to limit it to a = 3 g's (30 m/s^2) so humans can ride. The muzzle velocity is then sqrt ( 2 * a * d ) = 1100 m/s (Mach 3.6). This is in the range of what rocket first stage boosters do. The rest of the trip uses normal rocket stages.
Now assume what you are launching masses 100 tons (100,000 kg) and has a diameter of 5 meters. The pressure in the barrel then needs to be 153 kPa (22 psi). Gun is not really the right metaphor at those pressures, it's more like overgrown pneumatic tube. With the first stage taken care of, it is reasonable to expect 5% net payload, so you get 5 tons to orbit, which is enough to carry several crew.
It's not just the fuel you need to soft land, but all of the other added components (heat shield, landing legs, incremental fuel tank size) to make up a "recovery system" that you need to consider. The fuel is the cheapest part of the formula. Against that incremental recovery system cost you have the savings of recovering the expensive parts of the rocket such as the engines. Since fuel tanks are relatively cheap compared to engines, on a per kg basis, it's worth spending a bit more on larger tanks to get the expensive engines back.
The actual numbers for the recovery systems depends on what stage of the vehicle, and thus what velocity it is returning from. From the video, it seems like the first stage is flying a "blastback" trajectory, meaning it returns to the launch site. Since first stages are not traveling very fast, it does not take that much fuel to do that, and you don't need much in the way of heat shielding. For example the Space Shuttle solid boosters really didn't have heat shielding. Air drag will slow you down some, so fuel used to land is not that much. I can't give any numbers without knowing the stage velocities.
The second stage and payload capsule are going much faster, and so need a substantial heat shield to come back from orbit or near orbit. You pay for carrying that heat shield with more fuel going up, but you still come out ahead if you do it right. The correct question to ask is "how much extra cost is the recovery system for each stage vs how much expensive hardware do I get back and can use again?" When working that question, you should factor in 2-5% loss rate from failures, rather than assuming 100% recovery every time.
When one of these telemarketers/collection agencies calls my cellphone, I program their number into the phone with ringtone=no ring. Effectively routes them to dev/null. If I don't recognize the number, I don't pick up, instead I Google the caller's number. If it turns up on one of the several websites that track those kind of numbers, then I program it.
Let's call it a "Vendor Payment Agreement". It starts with "By accepting payment you agree to...", then follow with negating EULA's presented after purchase, and other objectionable clauses. Then we just need to link this agreement to our credit cards/other payment methods, which is a a business opportunity for someone. Call it the "consumer protection card".
A VASIMR type plasma rocket can haul back 20x it's fuel weight in from a nearby asteroid. Since part of most rocks is Oxygen, you can extract that and use it for fuel for later trips, and keep hauling back more asteroid chunks. What do you do with all that asteroid stuff in Earth Orbit? Any metals can go to building living quarters and machines. Any carbon can be used to create space elevator cable. Some oxygen is good for breathing, some for fuel, and some to make water with. You still need to bring the Hydrogen from Earth, but that's only 11% by weight.
This approach does two things. The partial space elevator makes it easier to bring stuff up from Earth. The ability to bring back and use materials from asteroids cuts the percentage of stuff you need to bring from Earth. Those multiply together. For example, if launch costs are reduced to 20% of what they were before, and you can supply 80% of your materials from asteroids, then combined your cost to get something done is reduced by 25 times.
There are approaching 20,000 public map regions on "Opensim" grids, many hosted by people on their own PC's. You can even run them standalone instead of networked, but there is no way to count those. The 3D simulator software for hosting those is open-sourced.
On a different track, HTML5 enables embedded 3D in websites. Not everything needs to be in 3D online, any more than it all needs to be video. What makes sense is to use 3D where it is appropriate, and other formats where they work better.
So my answer to why a "3D Web" hasn't emerged is it is the wrong question. The right questions are "When are the tools for anyone to build a 3D environment available to the masses, and not just game companies?", and "When will most everyone have the hardware to display it?" The answers are "around now", and "pretty soon".
"Hey, let's take all the advantages of a digital world - near instant access to anything anywhere - and throw them all out by modeling the limitations of the physical universe."
So in real life you can fly, teleport, and make objects hang in the air defying gravity? Second Life presents a 3D perspective view, but it doesn't model the physical universe very closely.
"Sure, there's a place for things like Second Life and WoW - but it is entirely social/gaming as opposed to being of any real use."
Tell that to the US military, and the Red Cross, both of whom are using cheap 3D simulation for training purposes. The former is using the CryEngine to build their simulations (from the Crysis game series), and the latter is using Second Life. For the Red Cross, practicing post-disaster setup and coordination is way cheaper in a virtual world than hauling out real life tents, and more effective than just reading a manual.
I don't want to mix my real life info like my name, and professional experience, with stuff I would not want a future employer to see. Hence the need to compartmentalize the data under different account names. Since Google+ does not allow that, I'm not interested in using it much.
Slashdot Mirror
Compare the cost of getting a court order to block a site, and the cost of the site switching domain name and IP address. Then they just need secondary sites, like torrentfreak, to list what the site is called this week.
Given that this asteroid masses 50 million tons or so, its too *early* to capture this asteroid. In any case it has a very different orbit, so the velocity required is higher than other targets. In space, physically close is not as important as velocity required.
Object 2000 UG11 is a better candidate, but even that is too massive (10 million tons). So an early mission will more likely scrape some of the loose material off the surface, put it in a big container, and haul that back. With a high efficiency plasma thruster, you can get back 20-50 times your fuel burned. By separating out some of the oxygen in the rocks, you can use that for future trips, making the mining self-sustaining in fuel. Getting the oxygen out is fairly easy by "pyrolysis". Simply focus sunlight on a closed container, and at a high enough temperature some of the rock oxides decompose to O2. Pump that away, and more will decompose to maintain chemical equilibrium.
That article is fundamentally flawed. It points to 2.3% per year increase in energy use in the US and ignores the population growth over the same period. In fact energy use per person has remained around 12 kW since about 1970. Homes are larger, but they are also better insulated. Vehicles and industry are more efficient. So while total energy use has gone up, energy per person has plateaued. If population growth in the US stopped, so would total energy use.
Now, world population is expected to level out around 10 billion. If everyone used energy at the USA rate, that would require 120 TW, or 8 times what we use today. The question is where can you get that much, and what are the side effects?
First, I dare you to design coal-powered cars and airplanes.
That was done 30 years ago. The Boeing Air Launched Cruise Missile (ALCM) used a kerosine/coal slurry fuel. Increasing fuel energy extends the range of the missile. Coal is nearly twice the density of kerosine, so even though it has slightly less energy per weight, it has a higher energy per volume. So they mixed finely ground coal in with the kerosine, but not to the point it would not pump.
Fuel is a good candidate to launch with a high-g device, but a mass driver is not the most economical way to get it off the Earth. It is fairly easy to show that a pipe will cost less per foot than induction coils and a frigging huge power supply to feed it, for the same job of accelerating a projectile. Generally, these type of devices are called "hypervelocity guns", defined as when the muzzle velocity is hypersonic (ie more than Mach 5 or 1500 m/s). This is roughly twice the muzzle velocity of large military guns.
In 1993 I was the study manager at Boeing for using a large gun to deliver fuel to a depot, which then was used to send communications satellites to GEO. The savings was you needed 75% less conventional rocket to launch the satellite dry. Hypervelocity guns are not new, they have been used for ballistic and re-entry testing for about 40 years now. NASA owns several of them. Mainly they need scaling up and "industrializing" - setting them up for regular operations, rather than research use.
To reach the highest muzzle velocity, you want to use the lightest gas (Hydrogen), and heat it, so the speed of sound is as high as possible. Speed of sound is the same as speed of pressure waves in the gas, and when your projectile exceeds that speed, there is no way for the gas at the back end to affect the projectile any more, because it outruns the pressure waves. So the gun gets very inefficient at that point. To make hot hydrogen, it is easiest to store it at room temperature in pressure tanks, then run it through a heat exchanger before it gets to the barrel. There is nothing that goes "boom" like a small gun, it's closer to natural gas pipeline operations (in fact, we sourced the gun barrel from a pipeline maker in the study). Find a suitable mountain, such as Cayembe in Ecuador (the highest point on the equator, and the right slope), and put a 2 km long x 60 cm I.D. pipe pointing up. Load a 600 kg projectile about 4 meters long into it, and it will accelerate at 900 g's, and come out with a muzzle velocity of around 5600 m/s. You lose around 1 km/s of that to air drag, and then use an onboard rocket to finish getting to orbit. Net payload to orbit is around 100 kg, which does not sound like much, but if your launcher is at the equator, you can potentially launch 15 times a day to a single depot destination. Over the course of a year that comes to 550 tons (minus downtime for maintenance).
For launching people and delicate cargo, Hawaii is the best location. Assume a 20 km pipe x 10 m diameter, pushing a 500 ton vehicle. It works out the pressure in the barrel needs to be 2 atmospheres (200kPa, 30 psi). That gives you 3 g's acceleration, safe for humans and satellite parts. Muzzle velocity is 1100 m/s (Mach 3.6), which is not a huge fraction of orbit velocity, but a nice running start before you light up your on-board rocket. Given those starting conditions, a reuseable non-cryogenic rocket should have a payload of around 35 tons, which along with a 10 meter diameter should be plenty for any cargo or people you want to launch. This is the upper end of what you might want to build, for your first low-g cargo launcher you can go a lot smaller.
What I regret is that Ghaddafi could not be interrogated by neutral agencies - say at The Hague. He had close relationships with the IRA, various Palestinian terrorist groups, and very interesting relationships with major oil companies. Now we cannot find out who he worked with, what bribes he paid, and what other crimes he and his government had committed.
He had lots of people working for him, and there is likely paperwork floating around his former government's offices. So there are people to question and document trails to follow, even though he is gone. I expect it will be a few years before the facts come out though, as the new government is starting completely from scratch, and is more concerned with getting basic infrastructure working than criminal justice.
The logical answer is not to start until your trip time is short enough that a later, faster ship is likely to pass you. That means push propulsion development until it appears to stall. For example, if you can do 10% of the speed of light, that comes to a 43 year trip to Alpha Centauri. If it looks like you can increase performance to 11% within 4 years, keep working, cause that will cut 4 years off the trip time, and more for any longer trip. If it looks like you can't, go ahead and launch. Given that current technology can give us maybe 0.1% of lightspeed at best, leading to a 430 year trip, for the moment the answer is keep working.
He ignored some key technologies that will make Space more accessible, such as a combination of robotic, automated, and remote controlled machines sent *before* the people, to prepare the way. For example, iron-bearing meteorites have pummeled the Lunar surface since forever. So around 0.2% of the ground up rock (regolith) there is bits of iron. All you need to extract it is a magnet. So send a solar powered rover around the lunar surface, sifting out the smaller rock particles, running them past a magnet, and saving the part the magnet attracts. Then run back to your future moonbase location and dump the bucket of iron enriched rocks. Repeat as many times as needed.
Your second machine has a large concentrating dish to focus sunlight, and some manipulator arms to smooth the ground and make slight depressions and grooves. Spread your enriched material over them and focus the sunlight, and you will end up with iron plates and bars. Your third machine has manipulator arms to hold the plates and bars in the right places, another concentrating dish, and articulating mirrors to direct the beam of concentrated sunlight at odd angles. That heats and welds the plates and bars to each other, to make whatever structures you want for habitats, etc.
Taking this kind of approach, by the time the first humans get there, the Moonbase can be mostly built and operating. There may have been 50 or 100 machines running around on their own or by remote control doing various jobs for a few years to get ready, and they will continue to work once the people are there, helping them out, and expanding the base. Places like the Moon have raw materials, and lots of energy from sunlight, and that's all you need to get started.
A better example is Haas Automation ( http://www.haascnc.com/home.asp ), where they use robots and machine tools to make more robots and machine tools. 3D printers are not set up to remove the finished parts and start the next one (at least not the home hobbyist ones). We are heading in the direction of "replicators" though, as automation improves. I don't think it will be one machine like a 3D printer that does everything. It will be a combination of a number of machines that working together can produce all of their own parts and then assemble them.
Fry's Electronics Retail Store Return/Exchange Privileges
1. For a refund or exchange, most products may be returned within 30 days of original purchase date. Some other products, such as notebook computers, netbooks, tablets and iPads, desktop computers, monitors, MP3 players and iPods, memory, microprocessors, motherboards, network-attached storage, CD and DVD recorders, camcorders, digital cameras, projectors, and air conditioners (IF UNUSED) may be returned within 15 days of original purchase date.
So where is the best combination of fast internet backbones, moderate cost of living, and no extradition treaty? I would look there.
Today's announcement that Google is shutting down several services highlights one of the risks of the "Cloud". Your service provider can decide to shut down, and you have no control over it. My approach, rather, is to keep the primary copy of my data locally. I use the Cloud for backup, and when I want to share data with other people, or myself when I am mobile. Depending on the Cloud for something critical is very risky unless you have a written contract with your provider to keep the service going.
GPS satellites are in a 12 hour orbit, which is fairly high up. That also puts them in the middle of the Van Allen radiation belts. If I remember correctly, they are hardened to about a MegaRad, partly to survive their normal orbit conditions, and partly to survive nuclear effects. So yes, they would survive the start of a nuclear war, it's part of the design requirements.
A nuclear sub's job is to get lost on the ocean. That means to sit quietly underwater so nobody can find it. Coming up to the surface to get a GPS fix defeats that job. Getting your fix just before launching is OK, since you have to surface anyway to launch. ICBMs have used inertial navigation since they first came into use. The accuracy of hitting the target is mostly governed by the accuracy of knowing the launch point. Star finders only tell you which way you are looking. They tell you nothing about your trajectory.
No, who is Lazlo? We did find the slightly radioactive basement of the Physics building, coffin shaped tunnels that led to the site of a satanic ritual, the second level, and a door to nowhere.
This was Columbia University, in Manhattan. Pupin Hall, the physics building, is where some of the first nuclear experiments were done. It's why the Manhattan Project was called the Manhatten Project. Besides having physicists able to work on the project, the utility tunnels linking buildings on campus made it easier to hide they were doing something important there. They would deliver stuff to other buildings, and cart them to Pupin out of sight through the tunnels.
Before Columbia bought the property, it was the site of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. The coffin shaped tunnels were how they transported patients between buildings, out of sight of decent Victorian age people, and hard to escape because the tunnels were just barely big enough for a person to fit. Those tunnels were still there, randomly intersecting with the newer consruction. One of them dead ended in a basement of a no longer existing building, which is where we found the melted candles and pentagram painted on the wall. Likely it was the site of a fraternity initiation.
The second level was the coal delivery system. The University had a steam plant, which is how the buildings were heated. It was centrally located, so the coal from the delivery trucks was transported about 1.5 city blocks from the hole they dumped it into to the bunkers near the furnaces via underground rail carts. These were underneath all the other tunnels.
The door to nowhere was your standard metal door set in a metal frame found in many commercial buildings, which opened onto...a blank block wall. This being Manhattan, the campus buildings are close together, and tunnels for all the utility lines makes maintenance a whole lot easier. My guess is this door was for future expansion to a building that had not been built at the time (late 1970's). Yes, we played Dungeons and Dragons in it's original paper and funny dice form, so it was natural to explore the campus tunnels to see how many places we could go and where they led.
we explored the tunnels under my University campus in the late 1970's.
Inspection of the atomic masses of nickel, copper, and hydrogen isotopes will tell you if any of the possible reactions are exothermic. If none are, the Rossi device would violate conservation of energy. If there are any possible reactions, that narrows down what to investigate.
It's not new physics at all, if you read the patent application. Nuclear reactions are a well understood part of physics.
What he is claiming is fusion of Nickel and Hydrogen to make Copper. A simple inspection of the Periodic Table shows that much is plausible since Copper is one place higher, and adding a proton moves you up one place. Next you would look at the accurate atomic weights. When you do hot fusion, such as Deuterium + Tritium = Helium + proton, If you sum the atomic weights of the starting materials, they are slightly more than the atomic weights of the products. The difference shows up as energy via Einstein's well known formula. So the question is for the Rossi reaction, what are the atomic weights of source and products? Without knowing the exact isotopes involved, I can't say, but someone can check all the possible combinations and see if any of them could be net energy producers.
If none are, then his patent application is invalid, as it would violate conservation of energy. If the device appears to work, it must be by some other method, or a fraud. If there are some candidate nuclear reactions with positive energy output, the next question is how does the proton in the Hydrogen atom get to the Nickel nucleus? Atomic nuclei are positively charged and tend to repel each other. If you can overcome the repulsion and get them close enough, the strong and weak nuclear forces can take over and bind them together. In hot fusion that is done by heating them to millions of degrees so they are moving very fast, and can get close before the repulsion brings them to a stop. In cold fusion there would have to be some catalyst or quantum effect. I'm not qualified to speak on that, but perhaps some nuclear physicist could.
Take a look at the big island of Hawaii. On the west side you have a nearly constant slope formed by lava flows. You can build a "space gun" there with a barrel d = 20 km long. Assume you want to limit it to a = 3 g's (30 m/s^2) so humans can ride. The muzzle velocity is then sqrt ( 2 * a * d ) = 1100 m/s (Mach 3.6). This is in the range of what rocket first stage boosters do. The rest of the trip uses normal rocket stages.
Now assume what you are launching masses 100 tons (100,000 kg) and has a diameter of 5 meters. The pressure in the barrel then needs to be 153 kPa (22 psi). Gun is not really the right metaphor at those pressures, it's more like overgrown pneumatic tube. With the first stage taken care of, it is reasonable to expect 5% net payload, so you get 5 tons to orbit, which is enough to carry several crew.
It's not just the fuel you need to soft land, but all of the other added components (heat shield, landing legs, incremental fuel tank size) to make up a "recovery system" that you need to consider. The fuel is the cheapest part of the formula. Against that incremental recovery system cost you have the savings of recovering the expensive parts of the rocket such as the engines. Since fuel tanks are relatively cheap compared to engines, on a per kg basis, it's worth spending a bit more on larger tanks to get the expensive engines back.
The actual numbers for the recovery systems depends on what stage of the vehicle, and thus what velocity it is returning from. From the video, it seems like the first stage is flying a "blastback" trajectory, meaning it returns to the launch site. Since first stages are not traveling very fast, it does not take that much fuel to do that, and you don't need much in the way of heat shielding. For example the Space Shuttle solid boosters really didn't have heat shielding. Air drag will slow you down some, so fuel used to land is not that much. I can't give any numbers without knowing the stage velocities.
The second stage and payload capsule are going much faster, and so need a substantial heat shield to come back from orbit or near orbit. You pay for carrying that heat shield with more fuel going up, but you still come out ahead if you do it right. The correct question to ask is "how much extra cost is the recovery system for each stage vs how much expensive hardware do I get back and can use again?" When working that question, you should factor in 2-5% loss rate from failures, rather than assuming 100% recovery every time.
Might be better to have a blacklist app.
When one of these telemarketers/collection agencies calls my cellphone, I program their number into the phone with ringtone=no ring. Effectively routes them to dev/null. If I don't recognize the number, I don't pick up, instead I Google the caller's number. If it turns up on one of the several websites that track those kind of numbers, then I program it.
Let's call it a "Vendor Payment Agreement". It starts with "By accepting payment you agree to...", then follow with negating EULA's presented after purchase, and other objectionable clauses. Then we just need to link this agreement to our credit cards/other payment methods, which is a a business opportunity for someone. Call it the "consumer protection card".
A VASIMR type plasma rocket can haul back 20x it's fuel weight in from a nearby asteroid. Since part of most rocks is Oxygen, you can extract that and use it for fuel for later trips, and keep hauling back more asteroid chunks. What do you do with all that asteroid stuff in Earth Orbit? Any metals can go to building living quarters and machines. Any carbon can be used to create space elevator cable. Some oxygen is good for breathing, some for fuel, and some to make water with. You still need to bring the Hydrogen from Earth, but that's only 11% by weight.
This approach does two things. The partial space elevator makes it easier to bring stuff up from Earth. The ability to bring back and use materials from asteroids cuts the percentage of stuff you need to bring from Earth. Those multiply together. For example, if launch costs are reduced to 20% of what they were before, and you can supply 80% of your materials from asteroids, then combined your cost to get something done is reduced by 25 times.
http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2011/09/top-grids-gain-883-new-regions/
There are approaching 20,000 public map regions on "Opensim" grids, many hosted by people on their own PC's. You can even run them standalone instead of networked, but there is no way to count those. The 3D simulator software for hosting those is open-sourced.
On a different track, HTML5 enables embedded 3D in websites. Not everything needs to be in 3D online, any more than it all needs to be video. What makes sense is to use 3D where it is appropriate, and other formats where they work better.
So my answer to why a "3D Web" hasn't emerged is it is the wrong question. The right questions are "When are the tools for anyone to build a 3D environment available to the masses, and not just game companies?", and "When will most everyone have the hardware to display it?" The answers are "around now", and "pretty soon".
"Hey, let's take all the advantages of a digital world - near instant access to anything anywhere - and throw them all out by modeling the limitations of the physical universe."
So in real life you can fly, teleport, and make objects hang in the air defying gravity? Second Life presents a 3D perspective view, but it doesn't model the physical universe very closely.
"Sure, there's a place for things like Second Life and WoW - but it is entirely social/gaming as opposed to being of any real use."
Tell that to the US military, and the Red Cross, both of whom are using cheap 3D simulation for training purposes. The former is using the CryEngine to build their simulations (from the Crysis game series), and the latter is using Second Life. For the Red Cross, practicing post-disaster setup and coordination is way cheaper in a virtual world than hauling out real life tents, and more effective than just reading a manual.
I don't want to mix my real life info like my name, and professional experience, with stuff I would not want a future employer to see. Hence the need to compartmentalize the data under different account names. Since Google+ does not allow that, I'm not interested in using it much.