There are a couple of different things going on here. First atmospheric pressure of mars is low, about 1/200th of Earth atmosphere. This is not a good thing for a balloon. This would mean that a balloon would have to displace 200x more volume per pound of lift. The good thing is that the atmosphere is mostly CO2 which has a higher molecular weight than Earth which is mostly N2 and O2(44 vs 29 g/mol average molecular weight). Add it all up and you would need a larger balloon, but less gas to inflate it than on Earth(for a theorhetically weightless balloon).
I think the glider might be a bit more unrealistic. It would seem to me that there wouldn't be enough lift with the thin atmosphere to get anything off the ground. The size of the wing needed would seem to be rather large.
I know for the TSA personnel you often see radiation dosimeters. The government isn't unaware of the risk. I'm sure they are much more worried about the carry on bag scanners than the backscatter machine. Those bag scanners have much higher energy and higher intensity x-ray sources. You know those black rubber things and lexan shields on those machines? Those are to block as much of the radiation as possible. The lexan of course doesn't do much against x-rays, but they prevent passengers from grabbing at a bag coming out of the machine which could get those rubber things swinging and exposing everyone.
I have a bet running with some friends that at some point a very frequent flier(daily) or a member of the flight crew will get melanoma from the backscatter x-ray machine(remember the x-ray dose is only to the first few millimeters of skin). The lawsuit against the manufacturer will be huge, because of course the federal government is shielded from those lawsuits.
Once upon a time I worked in a metal foundry. There people used induction furnaces to melt all sorts of alloys for castings. Skin depth is key. If you have tiny skin depth in your material it will take forever for something interesting to happen. Step 1 find an insulating container which will not burn. Glass can work(assuming your metal melts before the glass does) or ceramic is better. Place fun things in it like steel wool. Turn on the coil. Be astounded by steel wool. Aluminum cans are thin enough to melt, but be cautious they can ignite in air and if they do you can be poisoned or otherwise injured by the alumina.
I think it might be fun to use a thin metal implement in a glass bowl to cook something from a hot rod.
I agree so much. You hit the core of this whole issue. What is a kill-switch in their mind? Even if you switched off MAE-EAST or MAE-WEST, there is no guarantee that routers wouldn't find terribly slow ways around such a massive disruption. There is really no way to "turn off the internet" in the same way there is no way to "turn off radio". You might be able to disrupt a few places here and there causing the internet to go painfully slow or to shut down the servers of this or that business, but how would you shut off the internet outside of the US? Under what authority? Also think of all the people using VOIP who you would suddenly cut off as well. I'd love to see the political fallout of Grandma Smith being snuffed out by an internet kill switch.
You assume that if piracy was impossible, that those who would pirate would buy. This isn't the case. The lost revenue to piracy stats are hopelessly inflated.
If you proposed something like this as part of a medical research proposal it would get shot down. Exposure to x-rays, no matter the dose, always carries the risk of mutation and transformation to a tumorigenic state. Exposing these people to ionizing radiation without medical benefit nor consent is equivalent to shooting influenza at them. Most of the people will be just fine, but is it acceptable if 1 in 1,000 dies from a complication? 1 in 100,000? In practice the estimate of the radiation dose of these machines is underrepresented since they are using low power x-rays which are absorbed or reflected in the first few millimeters of skin. This means that the dose is actually concentrated into a very small volume further increasing the risk of cancer.
This is exactly right. Rare earths aren't that are at all as you'd think. The only reason we are all depending on China for them is that they seem willing to sell them to everyone else for less than anyone else can produce them. If they want to give away their natural resources, that is fine with the rest of the world. The US is sitting on one of the world's largest reserves, but it is not economically viable to pull them out of the ground vs China.
On the other hand helium is much more of a problem...
One thing that people seem to forget is that the protocols that the internet are based on are fault tolerant. They were designed to be able to adapt and route around broken links in the communication infrastructure. Breaking a couple links would cause the performance to take a nose dive, while the routes adapt.
The only way such a shutoff system could work, is if a sizable number of routes were simultaneously disrupted. I don't think there is any reasonable way that this system could be used to suppress information selectively without smart people realizing it. It would have to operate as an all or nothing switch.
This is less of a problem of movies and music, but if this ruling is allowed to stand a very large amount of books will cease to be public domain. One example of a work under essentially perpetual copyright in the UK is the King James version of the Bible. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples which could be dredged up as well.
From what I remember from a tour I had of the DSN facility at Goldstone is that even back then(~2000) that both Voyager 1 and 2 were well beyond the noise background. I think they said it was 9dB below noise even then. The only way they could understand the signals coming back from the probes was by "voting". Basically they would have the probe send the same message over and over and over. The message was then reconstructed by saying Bit #125 was 65 for and 35 against, probably a 1. More than that they also knew the formats of the messages so they would have a good idea of this bit is probably going to be a 1 or a 0 in particular spots. If something has happened with it, it might be impossible to ever reconstruct the messages coming back even if we have them recorded.
The signals have only gotten weaker since then because the probes are that much further and their power sources that much weaker. It is absolutely amazing they have been able to keep in contact as long as they have.
I also bought a 80gb Intel SSD. I agree that it absolutely lives up to the hype. I use it day in and day out on my desktop since March 2009. I have been running Windows 7 beta through release on it. I have had zero problems and zero performance degradation so far. I run games and I run normal productivity software. Nothing fancy, but it does see about 10 hours per day of use.
With that in mind it only take a cursory review of SSD articles to find that not all SSDs are created equal. Many are really crap because of bad controllers or flash cells that were not designed for use in an SSD.
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There are a couple of different things going on here. First atmospheric pressure of mars is low, about 1/200th of Earth atmosphere. This is not a good thing for a balloon. This would mean that a balloon would have to displace 200x more volume per pound of lift. The good thing is that the atmosphere is mostly CO2 which has a higher molecular weight than Earth which is mostly N2 and O2(44 vs 29 g/mol average molecular weight). Add it all up and you would need a larger balloon, but less gas to inflate it than on Earth(for a theorhetically weightless balloon).
I think the glider might be a bit more unrealistic. It would seem to me that there wouldn't be enough lift with the thin atmosphere to get anything off the ground. The size of the wing needed would seem to be rather large.
I know for the TSA personnel you often see radiation dosimeters. The government isn't unaware of the risk. I'm sure they are much more worried about the carry on bag scanners than the backscatter machine. Those bag scanners have much higher energy and higher intensity x-ray sources. You know those black rubber things and lexan shields on those machines? Those are to block as much of the radiation as possible. The lexan of course doesn't do much against x-rays, but they prevent passengers from grabbing at a bag coming out of the machine which could get those rubber things swinging and exposing everyone.
I have a bet running with some friends that at some point a very frequent flier(daily) or a member of the flight crew will get melanoma from the backscatter x-ray machine(remember the x-ray dose is only to the first few millimeters of skin). The lawsuit against the manufacturer will be huge, because of course the federal government is shielded from those lawsuits.
Once upon a time I worked in a metal foundry. There people used induction furnaces to melt all sorts of alloys for castings. Skin depth is key. If you have tiny skin depth in your material it will take forever for something interesting to happen. Step 1 find an insulating container which will not burn. Glass can work(assuming your metal melts before the glass does) or ceramic is better. Place fun things in it like steel wool. Turn on the coil. Be astounded by steel wool. Aluminum cans are thin enough to melt, but be cautious they can ignite in air and if they do you can be poisoned or otherwise injured by the alumina.
I think it might be fun to use a thin metal implement in a glass bowl to cook something from a hot rod.
I agree so much. You hit the core of this whole issue. What is a kill-switch in their mind? Even if you switched off MAE-EAST or MAE-WEST, there is no guarantee that routers wouldn't find terribly slow ways around such a massive disruption. There is really no way to "turn off the internet" in the same way there is no way to "turn off radio". You might be able to disrupt a few places here and there causing the internet to go painfully slow or to shut down the servers of this or that business, but how would you shut off the internet outside of the US? Under what authority? Also think of all the people using VOIP who you would suddenly cut off as well. I'd love to see the political fallout of Grandma Smith being snuffed out by an internet kill switch.
You assume that if piracy was impossible, that those who would pirate would buy. This isn't the case. The lost revenue to piracy stats are hopelessly inflated.
If you proposed something like this as part of a medical research proposal it would get shot down. Exposure to x-rays, no matter the dose, always carries the risk of mutation and transformation to a tumorigenic state. Exposing these people to ionizing radiation without medical benefit nor consent is equivalent to shooting influenza at them. Most of the people will be just fine, but is it acceptable if 1 in 1,000 dies from a complication? 1 in 100,000? In practice the estimate of the radiation dose of these machines is underrepresented since they are using low power x-rays which are absorbed or reflected in the first few millimeters of skin. This means that the dose is actually concentrated into a very small volume further increasing the risk of cancer.
This is exactly right. Rare earths aren't that are at all as you'd think. The only reason we are all depending on China for them is that they seem willing to sell them to everyone else for less than anyone else can produce them. If they want to give away their natural resources, that is fine with the rest of the world. The US is sitting on one of the world's largest reserves, but it is not economically viable to pull them out of the ground vs China. On the other hand helium is much more of a problem...
One thing that people seem to forget is that the protocols that the internet are based on are fault tolerant. They were designed to be able to adapt and route around broken links in the communication infrastructure. Breaking a couple links would cause the performance to take a nose dive, while the routes adapt. The only way such a shutoff system could work, is if a sizable number of routes were simultaneously disrupted. I don't think there is any reasonable way that this system could be used to suppress information selectively without smart people realizing it. It would have to operate as an all or nothing switch.
This is less of a problem of movies and music, but if this ruling is allowed to stand a very large amount of books will cease to be public domain. One example of a work under essentially perpetual copyright in the UK is the King James version of the Bible. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples which could be dredged up as well.
From what I remember from a tour I had of the DSN facility at Goldstone is that even back then(~2000) that both Voyager 1 and 2 were well beyond the noise background. I think they said it was 9dB below noise even then. The only way they could understand the signals coming back from the probes was by "voting". Basically they would have the probe send the same message over and over and over. The message was then reconstructed by saying Bit #125 was 65 for and 35 against, probably a 1. More than that they also knew the formats of the messages so they would have a good idea of this bit is probably going to be a 1 or a 0 in particular spots. If something has happened with it, it might be impossible to ever reconstruct the messages coming back even if we have them recorded. The signals have only gotten weaker since then because the probes are that much further and their power sources that much weaker. It is absolutely amazing they have been able to keep in contact as long as they have.
I also bought a 80gb Intel SSD. I agree that it absolutely lives up to the hype. I use it day in and day out on my desktop since March 2009. I have been running Windows 7 beta through release on it. I have had zero problems and zero performance degradation so far. I run games and I run normal productivity software. Nothing fancy, but it does see about 10 hours per day of use. With that in mind it only take a cursory review of SSD articles to find that not all SSDs are created equal. Many are really crap because of bad controllers or flash cells that were not designed for use in an SSD.