So you're assuming that this guy, who has spent $zillions on engineers for his successful SpaceX endeavour (including ones who _really_ understand both subsonic and supersonic airflow and boundary layer effects, which are all critical elements of rocket design), and for his successful Tesla venture, has not spent dime one on engineers to work out the details? Hmm.
Amtrak spent $80 million back in the 1980s on a plan to build a high speed rail from LA to San Diego. Every little burg between the two cities sued to stop it. They finally sold the plans to somebody for $5 million.
I would add to this that it should be within the range of possibility to build the system with enough motion tolerance and damping to allow the vehicles to slow down. Total motion in an earthquake is rarely more than a few feet - in fact rarely more than a few inches. That's in the range that modern jetliners encounter in bumpy air, at 500 MPH. I'm just guesstimating, of course but I can imagine suspending the tube in a framework that allows it to stay relatively motionless while the framework itself moves two or three feet. It could even be motorized to further reduce motion of the tube.
IDKA about Elysium, but Ms. Kramer is correct. If one looks into the NewSpace movement for rapid, commercial space development you'll find not just billionaires but regular people like you and me, working very hard to make human space habitation of whatever kind a reality. I've been 'interested' for a long time - I nearly joined the L5 society back in the early 1970s - but it wasn't until the last year or so when I really got interested that I discovered just how big the space industry is*, and how many people in it are dedicated, hard core 'space nuts'.
And the opportunities are there - I personally see commercial space and New Space as being where the electronics industry was in 1980. High tech was greatly enabled by the passage of the R&D Tax Credit in the early 1980s, and now Space tech is going to be similarly advanced by the establishment of the ISS as a National Laboratory, with a viable research support program via CASIS.
The thing is, rich or poor, everyone in this endeavour is doing it to help _prevent_ the degradation of Earth, and to optimize both the near-term (centuries) quality of life of people here on the planet as well as in space, and the long term viability of humans and Terran life as a whole when Earth does inevitably become uninhabitable - hopefully in the far future when the Sun expands to devour it, not before!
Some very smart folks have predicted that with the development of commercial space, the mean standard of living on Earth will be increased by a factor of 10, while reducing or (nearly) eliminating many of the problems we now face. Using discovery of the New World as our primary prior example, that's a reasonable estimate.
If you are curious, you can start with the recent NewSpace 2013 conference - some good video should be online by now, along with other good bits.
* One very 'Old Space' company, IntelSat, which was originally founded as an international monopoly, operates over 50 satellites (I think all in geostationary orbit) and launches several every year. This is all commercial, non-defense business. Then there's all the other TV satellite systems, and phone systems, and the ISS research, and now new CubeSat companies like NanoSatisfi, and then Nanoracks,... and biotech company Zero Gravity Solutions, and Deep Space Industries, and several dozen others - see the New Space Global company index.
I have a hypothesis that it is impossible for anyone who would actually be a good President to get through the nomination process. This hypothesis has proved valid for a couple of decades now.
The best data shows that homosexuality is, at most, 2-3% depending on how you count. The 9% figure was, IIRC, put out by the Kinsey report back in the dark ages, based on a study of a highly skewed population.
OTOH, since it's fairly easy to show that essentially all males will screw anything that doesn't run too fast when their inhibitions are down, perhaps it's a moot point.
(we in Good Ol' Europe had terrorism for a very long time and made a lot of mistakes - learn from them - but we never fought a "War on Terror" [except Turkey])
Interesting point - I guess you could say that WWI was started due to terrorism - the shot that killed the Archduke of Austria (shortly after an attempted grenade attack).
As a geek, I might also say that there was a bug in the structure of international relations (too many, too strong mutual defence treaties, and a colonial structure that brought in otherwise uninvolved nations), that allowed one incident to trigger war declarations that then propagated across the continent and the world, without limit (other than the planet itself).
I've never been convinced that the cloud was a good place to store stuff - even without the US (or any) government involved. In general, 'midnight auto supply and cloud services inc.' just seems like a really unreliable and unsafe place to put the business jewels, so to speak. It's hard enough to manage security for one's own hardware and software, but trusting an anonymous entity with unknown employees and who-knows-what kind of locks and security arrangements means that if a break-in occurs you are never even likely to know about it, much less have anything you can do about it.
Protip - a few years ago I was talking to the then-head of the Navy's then-nascent cybersecurity team (soon to become one or two battalions). He said that their red-team tests showed that the average cost to buy your way into a Fortune 500 company's data center was $7500. If nothing else, Snowden showed that it may cost nothing at all.
And that's not even to mention the potential penetrations at every ISP on the way to and from the cloud provider.
(Snowden seems to me somewhat equivalent to the 'Falcon' in "The Falcon and the Snowman", with updated technology. In 1975, the Falcon became concerned about what he saw coming across the teletype at TRW, and one thing led to another. He got out of prison (after 24 years of a 40 year sentence) a few years ago.
Long ago (early 1980s) I talked with an IBM mainframe support guy in Portland OR. I don't recall the conversation or how we got there, but he noted that at that time, a majority of IBM mainframes in Portland were still running DOS*, which preceded OS/360 and had been out of maintenance for 10 years by that time. For all those customers, it was in their interest to keep running their existing systems, because they worked and still did the job.
Of course, back then there was no issue with maintaining security updates. But it's still a valid point of view - if you have a process control system (whether a factory-floor process or an accounting process) that works, does what it is intended to do, why risk the disruption and costs associated with moving to a newer version? Backwards compatibility is a near-impossible goal (among other problems, the new stuff has to replicate all the 'undocumented features' and bugs that the code and the users depend on without knowing it.) Changing software generally will mean changing the business operations to match.
* DOS (not x86-DOS) was probably DOS/360, introduced in 1964.
Don't know how reliable this stat is(http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-still-dominates-global-internet-traffic-101026/), but apparently P2P (BitTorrent mostly) is presently the largest in most areas of the world, followed or led by 'real time entertainment' (i.e. streaming video). It's an open question whether real time entertainment (which is usually inside a web browser) counts as web or not.
There's other data out there (lots of it) but it appears that reletive to other protocols, email has fallen off a cliff. Interestingly, mobile internet traffic is now larger than the entire Internet in 2002.
Which raises the eternal question, "(How long) will the encryption be sufficient to avoid others snooping into it?" This is an easy question for information with no value, but as information becomes more valuable (in conjunction with an unknown amount of other information available for cross correlation), the question becomes harder.
I could see today some company offering confidential decryption services for corporate spying, which is run secretly by some professor on a big university's supercomputer to avoid the cost of actually buying your own. Cross-government industrial spying groups have been doing this for two decades at least. I would estimate that less than 10% of all corporate internet spying has been detected.
That's not the internet, although it may seem like it these days. I was sending and receiving email and files over the internet in the early 1980s, long before the WooWooWoo. In fact the WWW was really a logical extension of the NeXTStep OS with its object-based system, which allowed NeXTMail and, really, any document, to incorporate objects of any type - audio and video in email, or in a spreadsheet.
In 1990 I was product manager for PaperSight, a networked document management system that allowed annotation and attachment of any object to scanned documents for the paperless office, which ran on the NeXT. It was more capable than any web-based system I've seen yet, for that application. You could circle a word or paragraph and add an annotation, for example. The NeXT was the only machine+OS at the time that could handle the capabilities well.
HTML's primary advance was using a subset of SGML to codify the construction of such documents, instead of requiring 'real programming' to support it. I used to have a copy of the WorldWideWeb program written by TBL on my NeXT machine, and it was actually not at that time as capable as many other programs on the NeXT. Of course that was early days. TBL was always quite upfront about how he was inspired by the NeXT.
The other major 'innovation' if you can call it that, was Al Gore's sponsorship of legislation opening up the Internet to non-defense and non-research institutions. Then there was DNS, by Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris, which came out in 1983 - eight or nine years before the WWW.
Even today, IIRC email remains the majority of internet traffic, dwarfing WWW.
Reminds me of (IIRC) "Stranger in a Strange Land" - Heinlein. The Martian is brought back and kept essentially in a cage. Eventually someone is amazed that "they've managed to keep you alive and sane.", at which point the Martian says, "alive, not sane." More details not listed to prevent spoilers for those who have never read it.
NASA's budget is about equivalent to the money spent on cosmetics in the US each year. It's about 1/5 of the Food Stamp program, 1/10 of the interest on the national debt. It's about 1/3 of what the people of the US spend on shoes, 1/20 what we spend on restaurants, 2/7 what we spend on tobacco products, and 1/2 what we spend getting our hair cut. Given the US median income of about $50,000, if the government were a family, it would be equivalent to what the average family spends of their income, on beer.
What NASA has "done lately" with regard to 'marquee' programs is cope with Washington's repeated switcheroo - Ares, Constellation,..., every year or two Washington seems to cancel one plan and embark on another. In the corporate world, this is a classic sign of a company in trouble and about to go down the tubes, but in politics it seems to be business as usual. Further, what NASA does (not just manned space and exploration - everything) is about what women in the US spend on lipstick and other makeup, and only about 0.4% of the federal budget.
But while Washington fiddles, NASA has been a very effective promoter of both space-based research (making the ISS into a National Lab will result in advanced medical treatments and other benefits within a short time) and commercial space development, using relatively small amounts of money and creative approaches to help companies like SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace and others achieve the necessary capabilities to make commercial space development possible. Some of these companies are already profitable and the rise of "New Space" has been instrumental in reducing launch costs by as much as 1/2 for everybody. This in turn is making it economically feasible to do things like space mining and in-orbit satellite servicing and refueling. And the long term result of this will be to help cut the costs of building and launching the long-range exploration and research vehicles that NASA will need.
Wouldn't that be Whitey Bulger's little brother? Interesting that both brothers seem to have spent their careers in various kinds of thievery - one inside the system, one outside.
It's worth noting that the Boston 'patriots' were, by and large, smugglers and thieves. Hamilton's father got rich smuggling. And the original Tea Party were, largely, a bunch of tavern thugs paid by Sam Adams to raise a ruckus. The background was that the British government was nearly broke as a result of a long war with France of which the 'French and Indian War' in the Americas was really a sideshow. The Brits thought, for some reason, that the colonists should have to pay the costs of that war. They charged large customs duties (taxes) on imported goods including tea, sugar and other staples but Hamilton and others were bribing the customs officers quite successfully. So the British *reduced* the tax (I think by 2/3) and replaced all the customs officers so they couldn't be bribed any more. This increased the effective import costs and also eliminated the effective monopoly that Hamilton and others had on cheaper (since tax-free) imports.
I have long felt that the real lesson to learn from the Revolution was that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were not written for the innocent, but the guilty. The argument that "it doesn't apply to me, as I never break the law" if fallacious. In fact we are all guilty, of something.
Back in the Depression of the 1930s, the federal government established a series of programs that put people to work, building roads, bridges, parks and other infrastructure, and also scientific research and art programs. These folks didn't get a lot of money, but they were able to do useful work and send the money home to their families. Quite a bit of that work still stands, such as Timberline Lodge. Now the government spends huge amounts of money on duplicate bureaucracies, hands out money to millions of people, framed in such a way that those folks would actually lose money if they took a job. Even 30 years ago if the Health and Human Services dept. were a 501c3 non-profit it would lose its non-profit status as the percentage of revenue that actually gets to the target recipients is so low.
In part it's a systemic problem - back in the late 1970s I worked for a local social service agency. Since about 10% of their funding came indirectly from the Feds, in order to buy a pencil they had to submit paperwork to (IIRC) eight agencies with over 15 levels of decision making. This is the systemic argument against moving ever more activity to the federal level - all decisions should be made at the most local level practicable, but because the feds have to defend their system against a much larger pool of thieves, they have to have much more comprensive mechanisms to deter that theft, which engenders inefficiency and additional cost.
My sympathies. I am originally from Oregon, where a relatively well-designed tax-base property tax system was incomprehensible to the hordes of Californicators, who then voted for a series of stupid tax changes that (along with the huge unfunded pension liabilities instituted by innumerate legislators and local governments in the 1980s) completely screwed up the system and has made governing the state responsibly almost impossible.
Just because it can be done doesn't mean it will be done.
Totally offtopic, but this immediately inspired the contrapositive: "Just because it can't be done doesn't mean that it won't be done." I'm sure this applies to something, somewhere!:D Politics comes to mind...:P
Lots of things (materials like fuel, some/most electronics, and other stuff) can be made to survive very high G loads - when you drop your smartphone on the pavement it probably survived 100Gs or more - but the real problem for any kind of gun-type launch (this thing, or rail gun, or howitzer) is not the acceleration but the heat of the atmosphere when the vehicle starts going very fast. I only recently learned that when an orbital launch vehicle reaches some high speed (Mach 5 IIRC, but I could be off), the rocket engines are throttled back to maintain that speed until the vehicle gets above the majority of the atmosphere, to avoid burning up. This is a huge waste of fuel*, but necessary unless you make the nose cone into an ablative shield. Then, when the atmosphere is out of the way, the engines are turned back up.
*since fuel has mass, the sooner and faster you use it up, the more actual velocity you get. Burning just to maintain a certain speed means you're not accelerating to the required orbital velocity, just marking time while consuming a few thousand pounds of fuel per second.
Of course, a big enough ground-based launch system such as this proposal (assuming it works) could theoretically be scaled bigger to accommodate the mass of the heat shield. But the result may have such a reduced payload for the given launch vehicle that it is no longer cost-effective anyway.
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Yes, but at 800 MPH even a large blob of water can cause serious damage to whatever hits it.
So you're assuming that this guy, who has spent $zillions on engineers for his successful SpaceX endeavour (including ones who _really_ understand both subsonic and supersonic airflow and boundary layer effects, which are all critical elements of rocket design), and for his successful Tesla venture, has not spent dime one on engineers to work out the details? Hmm.
Amtrak spent $80 million back in the 1980s on a plan to build a high speed rail from LA to San Diego. Every little burg between the two cities sued to stop it. They finally sold the plans to somebody for $5 million.
I would add to this that it should be within the range of possibility to build the system with enough motion tolerance and damping to allow the vehicles to slow down. Total motion in an earthquake is rarely more than a few feet - in fact rarely more than a few inches. That's in the range that modern jetliners encounter in bumpy air, at 500 MPH. I'm just guesstimating, of course but I can imagine suspending the tube in a framework that allows it to stay relatively motionless while the framework itself moves two or three feet. It could even be motorized to further reduce motion of the tube.
IDKA about Elysium, but Ms. Kramer is correct. If one looks into the NewSpace movement for rapid, commercial space development you'll find not just billionaires but regular people like you and me, working very hard to make human space habitation of whatever kind a reality. I've been 'interested' for a long time - I nearly joined the L5 society back in the early 1970s - but it wasn't until the last year or so when I really got interested that I discovered just how big the space industry is*, and how many people in it are dedicated, hard core 'space nuts'.
And the opportunities are there - I personally see commercial space and New Space as being where the electronics industry was in 1980. High tech was greatly enabled by the passage of the R&D Tax Credit in the early 1980s, and now Space tech is going to be similarly advanced by the establishment of the ISS as a National Laboratory, with a viable research support program via CASIS.
The thing is, rich or poor, everyone in this endeavour is doing it to help _prevent_ the degradation of Earth, and to optimize both the near-term (centuries) quality of life of people here on the planet as well as in space, and the long term viability of humans and Terran life as a whole when Earth does inevitably become uninhabitable - hopefully in the far future when the Sun expands to devour it, not before!
Some very smart folks have predicted that with the development of commercial space, the mean standard of living on Earth will be increased by a factor of 10, while reducing or (nearly) eliminating many of the problems we now face. Using discovery of the New World as our primary prior example, that's a reasonable estimate.
If you are curious, you can start with the recent NewSpace 2013 conference - some good video should be online by now, along with other good bits.
* One very 'Old Space' company, IntelSat, which was originally founded as an international monopoly, operates over 50 satellites (I think all in geostationary orbit) and launches several every year. This is all commercial, non-defense business. Then there's all the other TV satellite systems, and phone systems, and the ISS research, and now new CubeSat companies like NanoSatisfi, and then Nanoracks, ... and biotech company Zero Gravity Solutions, and Deep Space Industries, and several dozen others - see the New Space Global company index.
Don't forget, Hitler was popularly elected. Most Germans apparently thought he was going to 'save the country'.
I have a hypothesis that it is impossible for anyone who would actually be a good President to get through the nomination process. This hypothesis has proved valid for a couple of decades now.
"I'm perfectly happy with free elections, as long as I get to select the nominees!" - Boss Tweed, 1890s.
The best data shows that homosexuality is, at most, 2-3% depending on how you count. The 9% figure was, IIRC, put out by the Kinsey report back in the dark ages, based on a study of a highly skewed population.
OTOH, since it's fairly easy to show that essentially all males will screw anything that doesn't run too fast when their inhibitions are down, perhaps it's a moot point.
(we in Good Ol' Europe had terrorism for a very long time and made a lot of mistakes - learn from them - but we never fought a "War on Terror" [except Turkey])
Interesting point - I guess you could say that WWI was started due to terrorism - the shot that killed the Archduke of Austria (shortly after an attempted grenade attack).
As a geek, I might also say that there was a bug in the structure of international relations (too many, too strong mutual defence treaties, and a colonial structure that brought in otherwise uninvolved nations), that allowed one incident to trigger war declarations that then propagated across the continent and the world, without limit (other than the planet itself).
I've never been convinced that the cloud was a good place to store stuff - even without the US (or any) government involved. In general, 'midnight auto supply and cloud services inc.' just seems like a really unreliable and unsafe place to put the business jewels, so to speak. It's hard enough to manage security for one's own hardware and software, but trusting an anonymous entity with unknown employees and who-knows-what kind of locks and security arrangements means that if a break-in occurs you are never even likely to know about it, much less have anything you can do about it.
Protip - a few years ago I was talking to the then-head of the Navy's then-nascent cybersecurity team (soon to become one or two battalions). He said that their red-team tests showed that the average cost to buy your way into a Fortune 500 company's data center was $7500. If nothing else, Snowden showed that it may cost nothing at all.
And that's not even to mention the potential penetrations at every ISP on the way to and from the cloud provider.
(Snowden seems to me somewhat equivalent to the 'Falcon' in "The Falcon and the Snowman", with updated technology. In 1975, the Falcon became concerned about what he saw coming across the teletype at TRW, and one thing led to another. He got out of prison (after 24 years of a 40 year sentence) a few years ago.
Long ago (early 1980s) I talked with an IBM mainframe support guy in Portland OR. I don't recall the conversation or how we got there, but he noted that at that time, a majority of IBM mainframes in Portland were still running DOS*, which preceded OS/360 and had been out of maintenance for 10 years by that time. For all those customers, it was in their interest to keep running their existing systems, because they worked and still did the job.
Of course, back then there was no issue with maintaining security updates. But it's still a valid point of view - if you have a process control system (whether a factory-floor process or an accounting process) that works, does what it is intended to do, why risk the disruption and costs associated with moving to a newer version? Backwards compatibility is a near-impossible goal (among other problems, the new stuff has to replicate all the 'undocumented features' and bugs that the code and the users depend on without knowing it.) Changing software generally will mean changing the business operations to match.
* DOS (not x86-DOS) was probably DOS/360, introduced in 1964.
Don't know how reliable this stat is(http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-still-dominates-global-internet-traffic-101026/), but apparently P2P (BitTorrent mostly) is presently the largest in most areas of the world, followed or led by 'real time entertainment' (i.e. streaming video). It's an open question whether real time entertainment (which is usually inside a web browser) counts as web or not.
There's other data out there (lots of it) but it appears that reletive to other protocols, email has fallen off a cliff. Interestingly, mobile internet traffic is now larger than the entire Internet in 2002.
Which raises the eternal question, "(How long) will the encryption be sufficient to avoid others snooping into it?" This is an easy question for information with no value, but as information becomes more valuable (in conjunction with an unknown amount of other information available for cross correlation), the question becomes harder.
I could see today some company offering confidential decryption services for corporate spying, which is run secretly by some professor on a big university's supercomputer to avoid the cost of actually buying your own. Cross-government industrial spying groups have been doing this for two decades at least. I would estimate that less than 10% of all corporate internet spying has been detected.
That's not the internet, although it may seem like it these days. I was sending and receiving email and files over the internet in the early 1980s, long before the WooWooWoo. In fact the WWW was really a logical extension of the NeXTStep OS with its object-based system, which allowed NeXTMail and, really, any document, to incorporate objects of any type - audio and video in email, or in a spreadsheet.
In 1990 I was product manager for PaperSight, a networked document management system that allowed annotation and attachment of any object to scanned documents for the paperless office, which ran on the NeXT. It was more capable than any web-based system I've seen yet, for that application. You could circle a word or paragraph and add an annotation, for example. The NeXT was the only machine+OS at the time that could handle the capabilities well.
HTML's primary advance was using a subset of SGML to codify the construction of such documents, instead of requiring 'real programming' to support it. I used to have a copy of the WorldWideWeb program written by TBL on my NeXT machine, and it was actually not at that time as capable as many other programs on the NeXT. Of course that was early days. TBL was always quite upfront about how he was inspired by the NeXT.
The other major 'innovation' if you can call it that, was Al Gore's sponsorship of legislation opening up the Internet to non-defense and non-research institutions. Then there was DNS, by Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris, which came out in 1983 - eight or nine years before the WWW.
Even today, IIRC email remains the majority of internet traffic, dwarfing WWW.
Reminds me of (IIRC) "Stranger in a Strange Land" - Heinlein. The Martian is brought back and kept essentially in a cage. Eventually someone is amazed that "they've managed to keep you alive and sane.", at which point the Martian says, "alive, not sane." More details not listed to prevent spoilers for those who have never read it.
NASA's budget is about equivalent to the money spent on cosmetics in the US each year. It's about 1/5 of the Food Stamp program, 1/10 of the interest on the national debt.
It's about 1/3 of what the people of the US spend on shoes, 1/20 what we spend on restaurants, 2/7 what we spend on tobacco products, and 1/2 what we spend getting our hair cut. Given the US median income of about $50,000, if the government were a family, it would be equivalent to what the average family spends of their income, on beer.
What NASA has "done lately" with regard to 'marquee' programs is cope with Washington's repeated switcheroo - Ares, Constellation, ..., every year or two Washington seems to cancel one plan and embark on another. In the corporate world, this is a classic sign of a company in trouble and about to go down the tubes, but in politics it seems to be business as usual. Further, what NASA does (not just manned space and exploration - everything) is about what women in the US spend on lipstick and other makeup, and only about 0.4% of the federal budget.
But while Washington fiddles, NASA has been a very effective promoter of both space-based research (making the ISS into a National Lab will result in advanced medical treatments and other benefits within a short time) and commercial space development, using relatively small amounts of money and creative approaches to help companies like SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace and others achieve the necessary capabilities to make commercial space development possible. Some of these companies are already profitable and the rise of "New Space" has been instrumental in reducing launch costs by as much as 1/2 for everybody. This in turn is making it economically feasible to do things like space mining and in-orbit satellite servicing and refueling. And the long term result of this will be to help cut the costs of building and launching the long-range exploration and research vehicles that NASA will need.
Wouldn't that be Whitey Bulger's little brother? Interesting that both brothers seem to have spent their careers in various kinds of thievery - one inside the system, one outside.
It's worth noting that the Boston 'patriots' were, by and large, smugglers and thieves. Hamilton's father got rich smuggling. And the original Tea Party were, largely, a bunch of tavern thugs paid by Sam Adams to raise a ruckus. The background was that the British government was nearly broke as a result of a long war with France of which the 'French and Indian War' in the Americas was really a sideshow. The Brits thought, for some reason, that the colonists should have to pay the costs of that war. They charged large customs duties (taxes) on imported goods including tea, sugar and other staples but Hamilton and others were bribing the customs officers quite successfully. So the British *reduced* the tax (I think by 2/3) and replaced all the customs officers so they couldn't be bribed any more. This increased the effective import costs and also eliminated the effective monopoly that Hamilton and others had on cheaper (since tax-free) imports.
I have long felt that the real lesson to learn from the Revolution was that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were not written for the innocent, but the guilty. The argument that "it doesn't apply to me, as I never break the law" if fallacious. In fact we are all guilty, of something.
Back in the Depression of the 1930s, the federal government established a series of programs that put people to work, building roads, bridges, parks and other infrastructure, and also scientific research and art programs. These folks didn't get a lot of money, but they were able to do useful work and send the money home to their families. Quite a bit of that work still stands, such as Timberline Lodge. Now the government spends huge amounts of money on duplicate bureaucracies, hands out money to millions of people, framed in such a way that those folks would actually lose money if they took a job. Even 30 years ago if the Health and Human Services dept. were a 501c3 non-profit it would lose its non-profit status as the percentage of revenue that actually gets to the target recipients is so low.
In part it's a systemic problem - back in the late 1970s I worked for a local social service agency. Since about 10% of their funding came indirectly from the Feds, in order to buy a pencil they had to submit paperwork to (IIRC) eight agencies with over 15 levels of decision making. This is the systemic argument against moving ever more activity to the federal level - all decisions should be made at the most local level practicable, but because the feds have to defend their system against a much larger pool of thieves, they have to have much more comprensive mechanisms to deter that theft, which engenders inefficiency and additional cost.
My sympathies. I am originally from Oregon, where a relatively well-designed tax-base property tax system was incomprehensible to the hordes of Californicators, who then voted for a series of stupid tax changes that (along with the huge unfunded pension liabilities instituted by innumerate legislators and local governments in the 1980s) completely screwed up the system and has made governing the state responsibly almost impossible.
Some processors already use asynchronous signalling across the chip. In fact IIRC this has been a feature of CPU chips for some time.
Just because it can be done doesn't mean it will be done.
Totally offtopic, but this immediately inspired the contrapositive: :D Politics comes to mind... :P
"Just because it can't be done doesn't mean that it won't be done."
I'm sure this applies to something, somewhere!
Lots of things (materials like fuel, some/most electronics, and other stuff) can be made to survive very high G loads - when you drop your smartphone on the pavement it probably survived 100Gs or more - but the real problem for any kind of gun-type launch (this thing, or rail gun, or howitzer) is not the acceleration but the heat of the atmosphere when the vehicle starts going very fast. I only recently learned that when an orbital launch vehicle reaches some high speed (Mach 5 IIRC, but I could be off), the rocket engines are throttled back to maintain that speed until the vehicle gets above the majority of the atmosphere, to avoid burning up. This is a huge waste of fuel*, but necessary unless you make the nose cone into an ablative shield. Then, when the atmosphere is out of the way, the engines are turned back up.
*since fuel has mass, the sooner and faster you use it up, the more actual velocity you get. Burning just to maintain a certain speed means you're not accelerating to the required orbital velocity, just marking time while consuming a few thousand pounds of fuel per second.
Of course, a big enough ground-based launch system such as this proposal (assuming it works) could theoretically be scaled bigger to accommodate the mass of the heat shield. But the result may have such a reduced payload for the given launch vehicle that it is no longer cost-effective anyway.