Having said that, I do object to religious organizations behaving politically, as the LDS church has done. There is a line between a church declaring its stance, and a church behaving like a political party. Donating $20 million dollars to a referendum campaign crosses that line. Such behavior is prohibited in many european countries, notably France, and with good reason. Church leaders should not wield political power. This is a lesson which I fear the US will have to learn the hard way.
I don't know where you or anybody else gets this $20 million dollars figure. Yeah, I might agree that $20 million dollars were generated from LDS members in support of Proposition 8, but that is a far and away different issue from the church, institutionally, donating the money directly from tax-exempt church funds intended to be used for the primary missions (aka purposes) of the church.
Yeah, if that came from the tax-exempt funds, I'd have to agree. It should be pointed out that the LDS church does "own" some for-profit businesses that generate income which is not tax-exempt (most definitely taxed at corporate rates). Some of this money may have ended up going to the prop 8 funding, but it certainly wasn't anywhere close to the $20 million out of the $36 million altogether spent in support of prop 8 in California.
According to the Deseret News, the LDS Church contributed in kind or through reportable donations something like a couple thousand dollars in support. As I pointed out, there are taxable funds in the form of political action committees and other funding sources that can easily pay for this that don't come from the tax-free donations most members pay in the form of tithing.
BTW, this is no different than black Baptist churches organizing their congregations in support of Democratic candidates, or the Fundimentalist Christian groups that formally endorsed and supported George W. Bush. Religious support for political purposes dates back to the very founding of the American Republic, and has an even deeper history with both sides of the American Civil War in regards to abolitionists and supporters of "states rights".
Heck, the worry when JFK was running for president was that he was going to be overly influenced by the Pope due to consistent political involvement of the Catholic Church prior to his becoming President.
I fail to see what lesson needs to be learned or what is uniquely different here... other than there are a bunch of highly ignorant folks who know nothing of the involvement of religious groups in the past, nor are you even acknowledging the involvement of other religious groups besides the LDS Church in this particular political battle. The LDS Church was hardly alone here either.
Had SS1 gone into the additional mission phase as was originally anticipated, I'm quite certain this issue would have been resolved.... and it certainly is being accounted for in the SS2.
Since SS1 went to the Smithsonian, there was no reason to keep tinkering with the launch regime, and it was sufficient to note that it was an issue. The SS2 test flights will certainly be interesting in this regard, but the larger mass may help it keep a slightly more stable flight profile as well.
It was a good point you made here, however, that the flights weren't without incident and could have ended catastrophically. I certainly wouldn't want to be on the first flight of SS2 without having substantial experience as a professional test pilot, of which Mike Melville certainly is one of those. It also doesn't hurt that the White Knight & SS1 share the same flight controls (as does the WK2 & SS2), so there was some built-in real-world flight experience that Mr. Melville could fall back on instead of purely simulator experience.
The trick here is to improve the "velocity" of the reaction mass as close to the speed of light as possible if you want to get rid of it efficiently.
Yes, energy is the key here and not necessarily mass. Normal chemical rockets really don't send the reaction mass out the nozzle at that high of a velocity, and instead make up for that by simply shoving out huge amounts of propellant. That is fine as long as all you are trying to do is go up a couple hundred miles in altitude, but it won't get you anywhere other than low-earth orbit in a respectable fashion.
With the price of getting anything into orbit costing currently close to $10k per pound (give or take an order of magnitude here, but at roughly this price), reaction mass for interplanetary missions (or even geosynchronous orbit station keeping) is incredibly expensive and you tend to run out of it in a real hurry.
By increasing the energy density of the reaction mass, you can sustain a burn for a much longer period of time. Alternative propulsion techniques (VASMIR & ion propulsion) try to take advantage of perhaps a trade-off of lower thrust rates in exchange for huge specific-impulse (how efficient the rocket engine is with its fuel).
Keep in mind that specific impulse is usuallly measured in pound(force)-seconds per pound(weight), which is why (falsely) they are usually quoted in units of seconds. The metric unit would be N-s/kg.
BTW, if you start to throw energy into the energy states of electrons and atomic nuclei, don't forget Einstein's famous E=m*c^2 formula, as that also applies in a huge way into reaction mass as well. Yes, this is high energy physics we are talking about here... like what is found in nuclear accelerators like CERN, but on a production device.
It should be pointed out that the "payload" (aka Spaceship two and "other stuff") is going to be carried about from the center of the aircraft.
The alternative would be to build something like a C-130 that would toss the "payload" out of the back of the vehicle. But then again, why do you need to wrap up an aerodynamically efficient "payload" with a hull that will only add more weight and engineering costs?
BTW, I'm certain there is extra reinforcement on the center span between the two hulls, if only to support the "payload", much less to be able to deal with the additional torque due to the two fuselages.
First of all, what is the likelihood that any of these journals would accept a paper from a non-credentialed college drop-out who decided to take a career path when the opportunity presented itself... but is otherwise intelligent enough to be able to read these journals and do the number crunching themselves?
There was a time that genuine amateur scientists were prized and valued for their contributions to original scientific research, and in a few fields (such as astronomy) such papers are still accepted if properly documented and discuss something that is interesting. I would dare say, however, that unless you have a PhD (not even "just" an MD), nobody at a medical journal will even remotely consider your paper worth reading, regardless of how ground breaking or thoughtful the subject matter may be... or how well it was written either.
If you can give me a counter example, I would love to see it. I just don't think it will happen, and such a dare as you have given is something physically impossible. And yes, I am suggesting that there are many very bright people who can study and research a very narrow subject like morbidity rates of MMR vaccines without necessarily having a full set of medical credentials first. Unfortunately, they won't be given the chance even if they put forth the effort to prove a counter example to what you are saying here.
Sorry about the delay, but this is just as silly of a comment as the one you were responding to here.
I am not dismissing that vaccines may be useful and indeed helpful to society as a whole, and indeed for most people they ought to be used and generally considered safe.
The problem is that parents are not told about potentially life threatening effects of vaccines or how they can cause permanent disabilities in at least a minority of the population, nor is there any realistic study going on to identify what may be the potential issues to look for that may cause these adverse reactions.
Some of the factors that may cause an adverse reaction are known to the pharmaceutical companies that produce the vaccines, but not all of them... and often your local community pediatrician (assuming that you are even going to a physician for the vaccinations) either isn't trained or is calloused to seeing thousands of kids that he or she simply doesn't care.
An LPN at your local health department certainly doesn't have the medical history (of your child) or background & training to warn you about negative factors that may be reason to avoid a vaccination, not to mention the bureaucrat at your local school district demanding the vaccinations before you can enroll your child.
I am presuming here that you think all people who select against vaccinations of their children are all making a terrible decision. I am arguing that such an attitude is as completely mis-informed as some biggot who refuses vaccinations out of a "fear of the devil" or some other non-informed viewpoint.
How do you possibly get "all the facts" when you are trying to raise a child?
Most parents (if you really are a parent) sort of muddle through the whole process of raising kids with imprecise information and an attempt to do the best we can with what limited information may or may not even be available to us at the moment.
Yes, reading first aid manuals, parenting guides, and other such books or websites may be useful, but more often you go on the advise of your own parents, neighbors and friends. There is often a whole lot of trust that happens too... sometimes misplaced trust at that.
As for "THE TRUTH" about vaccines, I don't really even know what the truth may or may not be here. Certainly it can be quantitized how useful vaccines have been in terms of the society as a whole, but as a parent you don't care about who a vaccine is generally saving the whole of society if it is your own kid that is the 1% or 1/10th% who gets screwed over with a bad reaction to a vaccine. All you care about really is how it is going to impact your own children.
I also don't think the medical community is being totally honest here, and that there can be some children who shouldn't be receiving vaccines. The trick here is to be able to make that decision... often with the medical community actively fighting against you or openly dismissing your fears without so much as even looking at any legitimate concerns you might have or even doing so much as even looking at your child at all, much less your child's medical history.
Muddling through is the best any parent can do anyway, and how dare you suggest that a child should be removed from a parent who is otherwise working in good faith to do the best they can for their own kids.
Sounds like the initial Space Shuttle proposal in some ways. I actually read something like $100,000 per flight for "routine" Shuttle operations and a turn-around time of 1 week. But that goes back to the 1970's and was wildly optimistic before any real hardware was built, much less any real engineering design took place.
While I think that manned spaceflight can be a couple orders of magnitude cheaper than the Shuttle, there still is some basic physics that seem to be missing from this initial proposal by TAAS.
Not even Armadillo Aerospace... which seems to be the most extreme of the private spacecraft development efforts in terms of being cheap, cheap, cheap, is spending more than $4-$5 million on their vehicle development... even for their sub-orbital program.
In addition to your excellent response here is in regards to the Soyuz T-10-1 launch that was the only realistic use of the launch escape tower as intended.
In that launch, the launch vehicle began to explode due to a fuel spill on the launch pad just a few seconds before the launch was supposed to happen.
As for the astronauts surviving re-entry from orbit for a situation like existed for the Columbia, about the only plausible method of survival would be some sort of personal extreme-altitude sky-diving suit + "surfboard" that would help astronauts do re-entry without a spacecraft. Well, either that or a formal "rescue mission" to retrieve the astronauts in another spacecraft (as NASA is doing now for Shuttle flights).
Once they committed to re-entry and came in with the full vehicle, their fate was sealed. Personal reentry requires a much more shallow re-entry angle and trades the extreme heat from heavy vehicle re-entry with a much longer re-entry period and less certainty for where you will eventually land at.
I don't see anything with this design that would allow for re-entry, which would rip off the wings of a normal airplane.
The sub-orbital designs by Armadillo, Scaled, and XCor at least show some resemblance to real vehicles that are intended to go into space and made by real rocket designers. Keep in mind that the real innovation that Burt Rutan made wasn't the fuselage of Spaceship one, but rather the "shuttlecock" system that allowed for atmospheric re-entry in a passive mode that would re-orient the spacecraft if it lost attitude control during re-entry.
This "spacecraft" design decidedly lacks such safety mechanism nor any sort of other exosphere control system.
Something really stinks here with this "press release" and my internal BS meter is hitting the red peg zone with this announcement. I wish I could define exactly what it is that I feel uncomfortable about, however. It isn't just the fact that they are a new entry into the field, but perhaps more along the line that they haven't done their early homework first.
It certainly smells like a vaporware company to me, like countless I knew during the dot-com boom and earlier technology bubbles.
The initial investigation was due to insider-trading laws, under the assumption that Martha Stewart had "privileged information" and allegedly made transactions in the stock exchanges due to this information.
Yeah, the obstruction of justice charges were the ultimate (and only) thing that stuck, but she did screw up and do some stuff that she shouldn't have done in the first place. Particularly being a sitting board member of the NYSE, none of this should have been new for her. Martha Stewart needed to avoid even the appearance of unethical behavior in the position she was in, and she didn't.
My point, however, was that there are regulations on both the state (in New York) and federal level regarding what banks and other financial institutions can do. While restrictions were certainly relaxed for some kinds of activities between banks and brokerage houses, I would hardly call the financial services industry to be "unregulated". Owing to the fact that most of the banks in serious trouble were based in New York, this certainly applies explicitly including in relationship to Ms. Stewart.
As usual, the wiki is our friend on this topic. Algae seems to be about 7x more effective in terms of creating biofuels as opposed to things like corn and other food crops.
One thing that pumping concentrated CO2 into vats of algae does is to boost its productivity, and it provides a natural heating source (from the power-plant exhaust) in cold-climate areas to keep the algae at their peak metabolic productivity.
Yeah, it is another form of solar energy, but it turns conventional automobiles into solar-powered cars (after a fashion). From this alone... if built near or next to existing coal-powered power generating plants... could provide a significant fraction of all of the petroleum needs of the USA. Assuming that groups like Tesla and GM get to build the electric vehicles and that they improve on the technologies to make them more affordable, petroleum importation into the USA could be a thing of the past.
The handwriting is on the wall for the major oil producing countries, at least if they are paying attention to developments like this. They may end up sitting on vast oil reserves and not have anybody but themselves willing to buy it.
There has been all along a plan for Tesla to build "low-priced vehicles". The problem is that the formation of such an assembly line, parts suppliers, and just the raw staff to make such vehicles would cost billions of dollars.... something that even the most wealthy individuals in the country could hardly afford much less a group of dot-com millionaires.
Frankly, I'm impressed with what Tesla has done so far, and even now Tesla is doing some serious belt tightening.
It should also be pointed out that this "bail-out" loan that Tesla is applying for is not to build the Roadster... which already has the financing and even proven customer base to keep that line going. This loan is instead to help build a much cheaper (about half the price of the Roadster) 4-seat sedan.
All told, the development of Tesla Motors could also end up being something important for millions of workers.
One thing that Tesla doesn't have to work with is a bloated pension liability that promised the Moon to a bunch of workers in the 1970's & 1980's that now has to be paid. All of the major auto companies got into very generous retirement policies... in part due to congressional pressure and some very screwed up tax policies in the past. While not the only thing that is causing a fiscal drag on the "big three", it certainly is a major contributing factor. Antiquated factories and calcified management practices have also been major contributors as well.
The "3rd Generation" Tesla vehicle BTW is going to be the mass-market vehicle. The problem with getting down to the comparatively low price of that vehicle (just a wild guess but priced at something like $25k) is that the profit margins for a vehicle of that nature are very low.
If you insist that Tesla build the low-end cars first, they'll either go bankrupt or find their competitors jumping ahead of them first.
BTW, the Roadster compares very favorably in terms of total cost of ownership (paying for fuel, vehicle repairs, and part replacements) to the Corvette. While the 'vette isn't exactly something ordinary mortals buy all of the time, it is made by GM... and the same logic being used against Tesla should equally apply to GM in this situation. It is the same thing ultimately. I should also point out that this isn't necessarily something restricted to the "super-rich" either.
It's a logical fallacy to assume that an evil genocidal bastard like Hitler is incapable of saying or supporting anything that is good just because he is an evil genocidal bastard.
This is one of the things that seems to be tough for some people to figure out. One of the more "weird" public debates that happened locally where I live had to do with water fluoridation referrenda, where the argument went something like this:
"Adolph Hitler encouraged the practice of water fluoridation throughout the Third Reich, and you can see what that did to the German people!"
I practically fell out of my chair when I first heard this argument and thought how utterly stupid such a remark even was. Unfortunately, it seemed to carry quite a bit of weight with the electorate.
I still don't know, however, what this has to do with Tesla Motors other than perhaps Elon Musk will eventually come out with the "Volkswagon" (another of Hitler's "innovations") of electric vehicles.
While Karl Marx certainly wasn't a mass-murderer, Josef Stalin certainly was, not to mention Mao Zedong. Both "illuminated leaders" were involved with so much death and destruction that it pales even when compared to what Hitler did.
Sadly, this excursion into Godwin's law has run it course. There should be a corollary here about how a discussion of fascism eventually devolves into a discussion of communism if left running too long, but I'm tired of arguing.
Yes, I'm well aware that the conversion isn't 100% accurate when trying to compare different modes of transporation, and there are other things to take into account when trying to do the conversion. What I am trying to say is that energy is energy, no matter what form it happens to take at the moment.
This page on efficiency at Tesla Motors does a pretty good job at explaining at least some of the conversion factors that also take into account engine efficiency, thermal resistance in the batteries, mechanical losses (even in the electric motors), and transmission losses from sending the energy from the utility plants to the vehicle.
There was a white paper on the Tesla website that went into much more detail, but apparently it has been pulled. The text currently reads that it will be updated for current EPA calculation standards, and I hope that it is at least as good as the paper that Martin Eberhart wrote in the first place.
BTW, one area where Tesla is sort of fudging the results is in the "cost of operation" which is different than the cost of fuel. The "big ouch" for the operational costs of an electric vehicle is battery replacement after roughly five years or so of operations. This is compensated for the fact that most of the systems are solid-state devices that don't have moving parts, and the mechanical systems that do exist are really quite simple. Wheel and brake systems are nearly identical for all of the vehicle power plant types, so that isn't even a consideration.
Having rebuilt my share of internal combustion engines, I certainly can say that the operational costs of an ICE vehicle include far more than just the raw gasoline costs as well. I certainly spend more than a couple thousand dollars each year just on vehicle repair and maintenance costs... particularly if I put into account the value of my time I spend on vehicle repairs instead of taking it to a local mechanic.
On the margin here, including depreciation and other factors, you are likely to be spending less money on an internal combustion engine vehicle... even taking into account fuel & repair costs. The big thing that Tesla and GM (with the Volt) need to figure out is how to drop the cost down so that electric vehicles actually start to save you money in the long run even taking the overall cost of ownership into account. If you compare a Corvette vs. a Roadster, Tesla may have the advantage here but not by a whole lot.
Quit whining. You had your chance. A lot of you got rich, and many of you will stay that way.
First of all, you have no stinking clue as to what political party that I tend to vote for nor have participated with in the past. It doesn't matter here and that is irrelevant anyway.
The "ponzi scheme" BTW had little to do with the actual housing market itself. Something like 95% of all mortgages or more have been solid investments and are loans that likely should have been made. It is that 5% of the loans that were made that likely shouldn't have been made in the first place.
Where it turns into a pyramid scheme is first where the assumption was that housing prices would keep going up and up without limit. A whole lot of people in the 1920's thought the same way about the stock market BTW.
Where it got ugly, and what has been a toilet flush to the national economy, has to do with all of the insurance, insurance derivatives, and some very exotic "marginal" buying that took place on top of these collateralized mortgage obligations. It wasn't even the CMOs that failed, but how they were packaged.
Taking a page from the risky borrowing that took place in the 1920's, these "investors" borrowed "on margin"... but instead of in the stock market they pushed into real estate instead.
Any body with a damn clue that read the history of the 1920's should have seen this coming like an asteroid ready to hit the Earth. This was even reported on by several television news networks and in financial pages about how risky this whole thing was.... yet nobody stepped in.
BTW, in terms of those congressmen that turned a blind eye here.... it was both Democrats and Republicans that screwed up here and I blame both political parties equally for this massive screw-up. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama were clean on this either, and I'll point out that Obama in particular had so much filthy "white republican money" going his way in the form of "campaign donations" that he certainly can't claim to be innocent of this mess.
Also, I'll note, I didn't expressly note what "constituency groups" were involved in this mess, as it was different for each area of the USA. As long as the money kept going to the political donation accounts of potential and current political leaders, those politicians stayed out of the mess. Some places I'm sure it was "rich white republicans", but I know for a fact that other "minority" groups were encouraged in a variety of ways to borrow on a house without any real reason to believe that they were ready to make payments.
It is these "poor folks", frankly, that are getting the short end of the stick on all of this. With trillions of dollars worth of money being pulled out of the world economy, these folks who signed up for these risky loans only to have the housing market yanked out from under them are having to pay the bill. Thanks to legislation passed by a Democratic Congress that has virtually eliminated bankruptcy as an option for middle-class folks, these people who borrowed this money are going to keep paying and paying through the nose for this debt even after they are evicted and their house is foreclosed, especially when they discover that their "mortgage insurance" is worthless.
As a homeowner myself, I have seen far too many of my neighbors get screwed over by the banking system and seriously taken advantage of.
Still, while the collapse of the housing market may have been the trigger here, that isn't why we are in the dire straights financially in the world today. It is all of the other garbage that was piled on top of mortgage industry expecting it to continue to grow when in fact it didn't.
You can take oil (and coal) exhaust from electric generators and pump it through a vat of algae, use the algae as solar collectors (to put the energy back into the carbon), harvest the algae and turn it back into oil. It becomes more or less a closed system.
This is something that is done today, but unfortunately not on an industrial scale. It doesn't violate basic principles of physics nor development of much in the way of exotic technologies.
As for the cost of the oil produced through this method.... that becomes something debatable but it certainly isn't something that has to be produced and shipped from the Middle-East. Hydrocarbon sludge is pretty much identical on a chemical level regardless of how you create it in the first place. Besides, there is this little thing called a "refinery" that separates crude oil into constituent products like gasoline, kerosene, and diesel fuel.
There really weren't "personal computers" built in the decade before the Altair 8800.
Unless you are talking about the PDP-8, but then again I wouldn't call that much of a "PC", nor would it be something that a mere mortal would have in their house. If I remember properly, both the PDP-8 and the PDP-11 required 220 Volt service for the power supply.
A friend of mine bought a (very) used PDP-11 a couple of decades ago and got complaints from his mother when he took over the outlet to her clothes dryer.
It should also be noted that just prior to the financial meltdown on Wall Street, Tesla was trying to get a rather sizable loan for the construction of their new line of vehicles. Elon Musk wrote about at least one of these loans in this blog post and he noted elsewhere that the financial meltdown killed some other financing for his company.
I see this "bailout" money as mainly money Tesla would have been able to get had it not been for the screw-ups in Washington DC & New York.
Whose bidding do you think the (soon former) US government did?
Are you implying something else here that I'm missing?
If the U.S. government collapses and the American Republic dissolves into 50+ separate countries in a state of near total anarchy, I promise that no matter where you live on the Earth or even in the Solar System, you are screwed. Life in general, down to microbes, will be feeling the hit.
You certainly don't want Americans on a large scale picking up the habits of Al-Queida and bombing the hell out of mosques & Europe in general regarding revenge for the destruction of their country.
The "unregulated market" in the financial industry was hardly unregulated. Just ask Martha Stewart who spent time in prison for her "unregulated" actions.
The problem that created the current mess came from regulators who didn't step in and use the authority that they had to stop some of the practices that caused huge problems, and a congress that pushed these regulators into give "easy credit" to new home buyers.... particular in congressional districts and constituent groups that favor certain... er... political viewpoints.
It is particularly telling that the congressmen who are demanding regulatory reform are the ones that largely caused the current mess in the first place through specific laws and other political pressure on the regulators to make the risky loans they are complaining about in the first place.
I think throwing tax dollars into the economy in this way is a waste of tax dollars down into a giant economic black hole that will gobble everything up with it, but if they are going to throw money around in this manner they should at least be consistent and not favor one company or group of individuals over somebody else. It isn't like Tesla is asking for the same size of a loan that GM wants.
I would have to agree here that it really stretches credibility for the government to be doing direct investment into any industry, either the banks or the auto manufacturers.
I'll bet that congress justified this bailout bill with a reference to the interstate commerce clause:
"The Congress shall have power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
To borrow money on the credit of the United States;
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;"
-- U.S. Constitution, Article I, section 8
Every bill before Congress has to enumerate what part of the constitution gives Congress that authority to act, but the ICC clause is one of the most abused and widened provisions that means just about anything that doesn't fit somewhere else in the constitution.
I supposed what happened here is congress is "borrowing money on the credit of the United States" and then "regulating commerce" in terms of determining exactly where that money can go.
Where Tesla gets into the picture is that congress can't target specific companies or individuals. As long as other auto companies qualify for the funds, Tesla does too.
If it helps with the semantics of the constitution, I suppose this could be a "negative" excise tax rate on automobiles.
In addition, on a more pragmatic level, Congress can't be seen playing favorites with the rust belt states over California... which has more than its fair share of political power on the national level.
There are several ways to justify this particular action of the government to give out loans, and it certainly is much more clearly something that could be interpreted in the constitution for this as well.
Fine, then just don't screw over Telsa by throwing tax dollars at the other auto companies either.
It is all or nothing. Why should the government get to select some companies for its largess just because they are being managed far worse than a small California start-up?
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Having said that, I do object to religious organizations behaving politically, as the LDS church has done. There is a line between a church declaring its stance, and a church behaving like a political party. Donating $20 million dollars to a referendum campaign crosses that line. Such behavior is prohibited in many european countries, notably France, and with good reason. Church leaders should not wield political power. This is a lesson which I fear the US will have to learn the hard way.
I don't know where you or anybody else gets this $20 million dollars figure. Yeah, I might agree that $20 million dollars were generated from LDS members in support of Proposition 8, but that is a far and away different issue from the church, institutionally, donating the money directly from tax-exempt church funds intended to be used for the primary missions (aka purposes) of the church.
Yeah, if that came from the tax-exempt funds, I'd have to agree. It should be pointed out that the LDS church does "own" some for-profit businesses that generate income which is not tax-exempt (most definitely taxed at corporate rates). Some of this money may have ended up going to the prop 8 funding, but it certainly wasn't anywhere close to the $20 million out of the $36 million altogether spent in support of prop 8 in California.
According to the Deseret News, the LDS Church contributed in kind or through reportable donations something like a couple thousand dollars in support. As I pointed out, there are taxable funds in the form of political action committees and other funding sources that can easily pay for this that don't come from the tax-free donations most members pay in the form of tithing.
BTW, this is no different than black Baptist churches organizing their congregations in support of Democratic candidates, or the Fundimentalist Christian groups that formally endorsed and supported George W. Bush. Religious support for political purposes dates back to the very founding of the American Republic, and has an even deeper history with both sides of the American Civil War in regards to abolitionists and supporters of "states rights".
Heck, the worry when JFK was running for president was that he was going to be overly influenced by the Pope due to consistent political involvement of the Catholic Church prior to his becoming President.
I fail to see what lesson needs to be learned or what is uniquely different here... other than there are a bunch of highly ignorant folks who know nothing of the involvement of religious groups in the past, nor are you even acknowledging the involvement of other religious groups besides the LDS Church in this particular political battle. The LDS Church was hardly alone here either.
You mean that a missile from an American warship went wild and destroyed the warehouse? Now that would be too good.
Had SS1 gone into the additional mission phase as was originally anticipated, I'm quite certain this issue would have been resolved.... and it certainly is being accounted for in the SS2.
Since SS1 went to the Smithsonian, there was no reason to keep tinkering with the launch regime, and it was sufficient to note that it was an issue. The SS2 test flights will certainly be interesting in this regard, but the larger mass may help it keep a slightly more stable flight profile as well.
It was a good point you made here, however, that the flights weren't without incident and could have ended catastrophically. I certainly wouldn't want to be on the first flight of SS2 without having substantial experience as a professional test pilot, of which Mike Melville certainly is one of those. It also doesn't hurt that the White Knight & SS1 share the same flight controls (as does the WK2 & SS2), so there was some built-in real-world flight experience that Mr. Melville could fall back on instead of purely simulator experience.
E = m * v^2
The trick here is to improve the "velocity" of the reaction mass as close to the speed of light as possible if you want to get rid of it efficiently.
Yes, energy is the key here and not necessarily mass. Normal chemical rockets really don't send the reaction mass out the nozzle at that high of a velocity, and instead make up for that by simply shoving out huge amounts of propellant. That is fine as long as all you are trying to do is go up a couple hundred miles in altitude, but it won't get you anywhere other than low-earth orbit in a respectable fashion.
With the price of getting anything into orbit costing currently close to $10k per pound (give or take an order of magnitude here, but at roughly this price), reaction mass for interplanetary missions (or even geosynchronous orbit station keeping) is incredibly expensive and you tend to run out of it in a real hurry.
By increasing the energy density of the reaction mass, you can sustain a burn for a much longer period of time. Alternative propulsion techniques (VASMIR & ion propulsion) try to take advantage of perhaps a trade-off of lower thrust rates in exchange for huge specific-impulse (how efficient the rocket engine is with its fuel).
Keep in mind that specific impulse is usuallly measured in pound(force)-seconds per pound(weight), which is why (falsely) they are usually quoted in units of seconds. The metric unit would be N-s/kg.
BTW, if you start to throw energy into the energy states of electrons and atomic nuclei, don't forget Einstein's famous E=m*c^2 formula, as that also applies in a huge way into reaction mass as well. Yes, this is high energy physics we are talking about here... like what is found in nuclear accelerators like CERN, but on a production device.
It should be pointed out that the "payload" (aka Spaceship two and "other stuff") is going to be carried about from the center of the aircraft.
The alternative would be to build something like a C-130 that would toss the "payload" out of the back of the vehicle. But then again, why do you need to wrap up an aerodynamically efficient "payload" with a hull that will only add more weight and engineering costs?
It is an amazing vehicle, and it will be interesting to see it in flight with the full operational mode including the spacecraft.
BTW, I'm certain there is extra reinforcement on the center span between the two hulls, if only to support the "payload", much less to be able to deal with the additional torque due to the two fuselages.
First of all, what is the likelihood that any of these journals would accept a paper from a non-credentialed college drop-out who decided to take a career path when the opportunity presented itself... but is otherwise intelligent enough to be able to read these journals and do the number crunching themselves?
There was a time that genuine amateur scientists were prized and valued for their contributions to original scientific research, and in a few fields (such as astronomy) such papers are still accepted if properly documented and discuss something that is interesting. I would dare say, however, that unless you have a PhD (not even "just" an MD), nobody at a medical journal will even remotely consider your paper worth reading, regardless of how ground breaking or thoughtful the subject matter may be... or how well it was written either.
If you can give me a counter example, I would love to see it. I just don't think it will happen, and such a dare as you have given is something physically impossible. And yes, I am suggesting that there are many very bright people who can study and research a very narrow subject like morbidity rates of MMR vaccines without necessarily having a full set of medical credentials first. Unfortunately, they won't be given the chance even if they put forth the effort to prove a counter example to what you are saying here.
No, this isn't justifiable.
Sorry about the delay, but this is just as silly of a comment as the one you were responding to here.
I am not dismissing that vaccines may be useful and indeed helpful to society as a whole, and indeed for most people they ought to be used and generally considered safe.
The problem is that parents are not told about potentially life threatening effects of vaccines or how they can cause permanent disabilities in at least a minority of the population, nor is there any realistic study going on to identify what may be the potential issues to look for that may cause these adverse reactions.
Some of the factors that may cause an adverse reaction are known to the pharmaceutical companies that produce the vaccines, but not all of them... and often your local community pediatrician (assuming that you are even going to a physician for the vaccinations) either isn't trained or is calloused to seeing thousands of kids that he or she simply doesn't care.
An LPN at your local health department certainly doesn't have the medical history (of your child) or background & training to warn you about negative factors that may be reason to avoid a vaccination, not to mention the bureaucrat at your local school district demanding the vaccinations before you can enroll your child.
I am presuming here that you think all people who select against vaccinations of their children are all making a terrible decision. I am arguing that such an attitude is as completely mis-informed as some biggot who refuses vaccinations out of a "fear of the devil" or some other non-informed viewpoint.
How do you possibly get "all the facts" when you are trying to raise a child?
Most parents (if you really are a parent) sort of muddle through the whole process of raising kids with imprecise information and an attempt to do the best we can with what limited information may or may not even be available to us at the moment.
Yes, reading first aid manuals, parenting guides, and other such books or websites may be useful, but more often you go on the advise of your own parents, neighbors and friends. There is often a whole lot of trust that happens too... sometimes misplaced trust at that.
As for "THE TRUTH" about vaccines, I don't really even know what the truth may or may not be here. Certainly it can be quantitized how useful vaccines have been in terms of the society as a whole, but as a parent you don't care about who a vaccine is generally saving the whole of society if it is your own kid that is the 1% or 1/10th% who gets screwed over with a bad reaction to a vaccine. All you care about really is how it is going to impact your own children.
I also don't think the medical community is being totally honest here, and that there can be some children who shouldn't be receiving vaccines. The trick here is to be able to make that decision... often with the medical community actively fighting against you or openly dismissing your fears without so much as even looking at any legitimate concerns you might have or even doing so much as even looking at your child at all, much less your child's medical history.
Muddling through is the best any parent can do anyway, and how dare you suggest that a child should be removed from a parent who is otherwise working in good faith to do the best they can for their own kids.
Sounds like the initial Space Shuttle proposal in some ways. I actually read something like $100,000 per flight for "routine" Shuttle operations and a turn-around time of 1 week. But that goes back to the 1970's and was wildly optimistic before any real hardware was built, much less any real engineering design took place.
While I think that manned spaceflight can be a couple orders of magnitude cheaper than the Shuttle, there still is some basic physics that seem to be missing from this initial proposal by TAAS.
Not even Armadillo Aerospace... which seems to be the most extreme of the private spacecraft development efforts in terms of being cheap, cheap, cheap, is spending more than $4-$5 million on their vehicle development... even for their sub-orbital program.
In addition to your excellent response here is in regards to the Soyuz T-10-1 launch that was the only realistic use of the launch escape tower as intended.
In that launch, the launch vehicle began to explode due to a fuel spill on the launch pad just a few seconds before the launch was supposed to happen.
As for the astronauts surviving re-entry from orbit for a situation like existed for the Columbia, about the only plausible method of survival would be some sort of personal extreme-altitude sky-diving suit + "surfboard" that would help astronauts do re-entry without a spacecraft. Well, either that or a formal "rescue mission" to retrieve the astronauts in another spacecraft (as NASA is doing now for Shuttle flights).
Once they committed to re-entry and came in with the full vehicle, their fate was sealed. Personal reentry requires a much more shallow re-entry angle and trades the extreme heat from heavy vehicle re-entry with a much longer re-entry period and less certainty for where you will eventually land at.
I don't see anything with this design that would allow for re-entry, which would rip off the wings of a normal airplane.
The sub-orbital designs by Armadillo, Scaled, and XCor at least show some resemblance to real vehicles that are intended to go into space and made by real rocket designers. Keep in mind that the real innovation that Burt Rutan made wasn't the fuselage of Spaceship one, but rather the "shuttlecock" system that allowed for atmospheric re-entry in a passive mode that would re-orient the spacecraft if it lost attitude control during re-entry.
This "spacecraft" design decidedly lacks such safety mechanism nor any sort of other exosphere control system.
Something really stinks here with this "press release" and my internal BS meter is hitting the red peg zone with this announcement. I wish I could define exactly what it is that I feel uncomfortable about, however. It isn't just the fact that they are a new entry into the field, but perhaps more along the line that they haven't done their early homework first.
It certainly smells like a vaporware company to me, like countless I knew during the dot-com boom and earlier technology bubbles.
The initial investigation was due to insider-trading laws, under the assumption that Martha Stewart had "privileged information" and allegedly made transactions in the stock exchanges due to this information.
Yeah, the obstruction of justice charges were the ultimate (and only) thing that stuck, but she did screw up and do some stuff that she shouldn't have done in the first place. Particularly being a sitting board member of the NYSE, none of this should have been new for her. Martha Stewart needed to avoid even the appearance of unethical behavior in the position she was in, and she didn't.
My point, however, was that there are regulations on both the state (in New York) and federal level regarding what banks and other financial institutions can do. While restrictions were certainly relaxed for some kinds of activities between banks and brokerage houses, I would hardly call the financial services industry to be "unregulated". Owing to the fact that most of the banks in serious trouble were based in New York, this certainly applies explicitly including in relationship to Ms. Stewart.
As usual, the wiki is our friend on this topic. Algae seems to be about 7x more effective in terms of creating biofuels as opposed to things like corn and other food crops.
One thing that pumping concentrated CO2 into vats of algae does is to boost its productivity, and it provides a natural heating source (from the power-plant exhaust) in cold-climate areas to keep the algae at their peak metabolic productivity.
Yeah, it is another form of solar energy, but it turns conventional automobiles into solar-powered cars (after a fashion). From this alone... if built near or next to existing coal-powered power generating plants... could provide a significant fraction of all of the petroleum needs of the USA. Assuming that groups like Tesla and GM get to build the electric vehicles and that they improve on the technologies to make them more affordable, petroleum importation into the USA could be a thing of the past.
The handwriting is on the wall for the major oil producing countries, at least if they are paying attention to developments like this. They may end up sitting on vast oil reserves and not have anybody but themselves willing to buy it.
There has been all along a plan for Tesla to build "low-priced vehicles". The problem is that the formation of such an assembly line, parts suppliers, and just the raw staff to make such vehicles would cost billions of dollars.... something that even the most wealthy individuals in the country could hardly afford much less a group of dot-com millionaires.
Frankly, I'm impressed with what Tesla has done so far, and even now Tesla is doing some serious belt tightening.
It should also be pointed out that this "bail-out" loan that Tesla is applying for is not to build the Roadster... which already has the financing and even proven customer base to keep that line going. This loan is instead to help build a much cheaper (about half the price of the Roadster) 4-seat sedan.
All told, the development of Tesla Motors could also end up being something important for millions of workers.
One thing that Tesla doesn't have to work with is a bloated pension liability that promised the Moon to a bunch of workers in the 1970's & 1980's that now has to be paid. All of the major auto companies got into very generous retirement policies... in part due to congressional pressure and some very screwed up tax policies in the past. While not the only thing that is causing a fiscal drag on the "big three", it certainly is a major contributing factor. Antiquated factories and calcified management practices have also been major contributors as well.
The "3rd Generation" Tesla vehicle BTW is going to be the mass-market vehicle. The problem with getting down to the comparatively low price of that vehicle (just a wild guess but priced at something like $25k) is that the profit margins for a vehicle of that nature are very low.
If you insist that Tesla build the low-end cars first, they'll either go bankrupt or find their competitors jumping ahead of them first.
BTW, the Roadster compares very favorably in terms of total cost of ownership (paying for fuel, vehicle repairs, and part replacements) to the Corvette. While the 'vette isn't exactly something ordinary mortals buy all of the time, it is made by GM... and the same logic being used against Tesla should equally apply to GM in this situation. It is the same thing ultimately. I should also point out that this isn't necessarily something restricted to the "super-rich" either.
This is one of the things that seems to be tough for some people to figure out. One of the more "weird" public debates that happened locally where I live had to do with water fluoridation referrenda, where the argument went something like this:
"Adolph Hitler encouraged the practice of water fluoridation throughout the Third Reich, and you can see what that did to the German people!"
I practically fell out of my chair when I first heard this argument and thought how utterly stupid such a remark even was. Unfortunately, it seemed to carry quite a bit of weight with the electorate.
I still don't know, however, what this has to do with Tesla Motors other than perhaps Elon Musk will eventually come out with the "Volkswagon" (another of Hitler's "innovations") of electric vehicles.
While Karl Marx certainly wasn't a mass-murderer, Josef Stalin certainly was, not to mention Mao Zedong. Both "illuminated leaders" were involved with so much death and destruction that it pales even when compared to what Hitler did.
Sadly, this excursion into Godwin's law has run it course. There should be a corollary here about how a discussion of fascism eventually devolves into a discussion of communism if left running too long, but I'm tired of arguing.
Yes, I'm well aware that the conversion isn't 100% accurate when trying to compare different modes of transporation, and there are other things to take into account when trying to do the conversion. What I am trying to say is that energy is energy, no matter what form it happens to take at the moment.
This page on efficiency at Tesla Motors does a pretty good job at explaining at least some of the conversion factors that also take into account engine efficiency, thermal resistance in the batteries, mechanical losses (even in the electric motors), and transmission losses from sending the energy from the utility plants to the vehicle.
There was a white paper on the Tesla website that went into much more detail, but apparently it has been pulled. The text currently reads that it will be updated for current EPA calculation standards, and I hope that it is at least as good as the paper that Martin Eberhart wrote in the first place.
BTW, one area where Tesla is sort of fudging the results is in the "cost of operation" which is different than the cost of fuel. The "big ouch" for the operational costs of an electric vehicle is battery replacement after roughly five years or so of operations. This is compensated for the fact that most of the systems are solid-state devices that don't have moving parts, and the mechanical systems that do exist are really quite simple. Wheel and brake systems are nearly identical for all of the vehicle power plant types, so that isn't even a consideration.
Having rebuilt my share of internal combustion engines, I certainly can say that the operational costs of an ICE vehicle include far more than just the raw gasoline costs as well. I certainly spend more than a couple thousand dollars each year just on vehicle repair and maintenance costs... particularly if I put into account the value of my time I spend on vehicle repairs instead of taking it to a local mechanic.
On the margin here, including depreciation and other factors, you are likely to be spending less money on an internal combustion engine vehicle... even taking into account fuel & repair costs. The big thing that Tesla and GM (with the Volt) need to figure out is how to drop the cost down so that electric vehicles actually start to save you money in the long run even taking the overall cost of ownership into account. If you compare a Corvette vs. a Roadster, Tesla may have the advantage here but not by a whole lot.
First of all, you have no stinking clue as to what political party that I tend to vote for nor have participated with in the past. It doesn't matter here and that is irrelevant anyway.
The "ponzi scheme" BTW had little to do with the actual housing market itself. Something like 95% of all mortgages or more have been solid investments and are loans that likely should have been made. It is that 5% of the loans that were made that likely shouldn't have been made in the first place.
Where it turns into a pyramid scheme is first where the assumption was that housing prices would keep going up and up without limit. A whole lot of people in the 1920's thought the same way about the stock market BTW.
Where it got ugly, and what has been a toilet flush to the national economy, has to do with all of the insurance, insurance derivatives, and some very exotic "marginal" buying that took place on top of these collateralized mortgage obligations. It wasn't even the CMOs that failed, but how they were packaged.
Taking a page from the risky borrowing that took place in the 1920's, these "investors" borrowed "on margin"... but instead of in the stock market they pushed into real estate instead.
Any body with a damn clue that read the history of the 1920's should have seen this coming like an asteroid ready to hit the Earth. This was even reported on by several television news networks and in financial pages about how risky this whole thing was.... yet nobody stepped in.
BTW, in terms of those congressmen that turned a blind eye here.... it was both Democrats and Republicans that screwed up here and I blame both political parties equally for this massive screw-up. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama were clean on this either, and I'll point out that Obama in particular had so much filthy "white republican money" going his way in the form of "campaign donations" that he certainly can't claim to be innocent of this mess.
Also, I'll note, I didn't expressly note what "constituency groups" were involved in this mess, as it was different for each area of the USA. As long as the money kept going to the political donation accounts of potential and current political leaders, those politicians stayed out of the mess. Some places I'm sure it was "rich white republicans", but I know for a fact that other "minority" groups were encouraged in a variety of ways to borrow on a house without any real reason to believe that they were ready to make payments.
It is these "poor folks", frankly, that are getting the short end of the stick on all of this. With trillions of dollars worth of money being pulled out of the world economy, these folks who signed up for these risky loans only to have the housing market yanked out from under them are having to pay the bill. Thanks to legislation passed by a Democratic Congress that has virtually eliminated bankruptcy as an option for middle-class folks, these people who borrowed this money are going to keep paying and paying through the nose for this debt even after they are evicted and their house is foreclosed, especially when they discover that their "mortgage insurance" is worthless.
As a homeowner myself, I have seen far too many of my neighbors get screwed over by the banking system and seriously taken advantage of.
Still, while the collapse of the housing market may have been the trigger here, that isn't why we are in the dire straights financially in the world today. It is all of the other garbage that was piled on top of mortgage industry expecting it to continue to grow when in fact it didn't.
You can take oil (and coal) exhaust from electric generators and pump it through a vat of algae, use the algae as solar collectors (to put the energy back into the carbon), harvest the algae and turn it back into oil. It becomes more or less a closed system.
This is something that is done today, but unfortunately not on an industrial scale. It doesn't violate basic principles of physics nor development of much in the way of exotic technologies.
As for the cost of the oil produced through this method.... that becomes something debatable but it certainly isn't something that has to be produced and shipped from the Middle-East. Hydrocarbon sludge is pretty much identical on a chemical level regardless of how you create it in the first place. Besides, there is this little thing called a "refinery" that separates crude oil into constituent products like gasoline, kerosene, and diesel fuel.
There really weren't "personal computers" built in the decade before the Altair 8800.
Unless you are talking about the PDP-8, but then again I wouldn't call that much of a "PC", nor would it be something that a mere mortal would have in their house. If I remember properly, both the PDP-8 and the PDP-11 required 220 Volt service for the power supply.
A friend of mine bought a (very) used PDP-11 a couple of decades ago and got complaints from his mother when he took over the outlet to her clothes dryer.
It should also be noted that just prior to the financial meltdown on Wall Street, Tesla was trying to get a rather sizable loan for the construction of their new line of vehicles. Elon Musk wrote about at least one of these loans in this blog post and he noted elsewhere that the financial meltdown killed some other financing for his company.
I see this "bailout" money as mainly money Tesla would have been able to get had it not been for the screw-ups in Washington DC & New York.
Are you implying something else here that I'm missing?
If the U.S. government collapses and the American Republic dissolves into 50+ separate countries in a state of near total anarchy, I promise that no matter where you live on the Earth or even in the Solar System, you are screwed. Life in general, down to microbes, will be feeling the hit.
You certainly don't want Americans on a large scale picking up the habits of Al-Queida and bombing the hell out of mosques & Europe in general regarding revenge for the destruction of their country.
The "unregulated market" in the financial industry was hardly unregulated. Just ask Martha Stewart who spent time in prison for her "unregulated" actions.
The problem that created the current mess came from regulators who didn't step in and use the authority that they had to stop some of the practices that caused huge problems, and a congress that pushed these regulators into give "easy credit" to new home buyers.... particular in congressional districts and constituent groups that favor certain... er... political viewpoints.
It is particularly telling that the congressmen who are demanding regulatory reform are the ones that largely caused the current mess in the first place through specific laws and other political pressure on the regulators to make the risky loans they are complaining about in the first place.
I think throwing tax dollars into the economy in this way is a waste of tax dollars down into a giant economic black hole that will gobble everything up with it, but if they are going to throw money around in this manner they should at least be consistent and not favor one company or group of individuals over somebody else. It isn't like Tesla is asking for the same size of a loan that GM wants.
I would have to agree here that it really stretches credibility for the government to be doing direct investment into any industry, either the banks or the auto manufacturers.
I'll bet that congress justified this bailout bill with a reference to the interstate commerce clause:
Every bill before Congress has to enumerate what part of the constitution gives Congress that authority to act, but the ICC clause is one of the most abused and widened provisions that means just about anything that doesn't fit somewhere else in the constitution.
I supposed what happened here is congress is "borrowing money on the credit of the United States" and then "regulating commerce" in terms of determining exactly where that money can go.
Where Tesla gets into the picture is that congress can't target specific companies or individuals. As long as other auto companies qualify for the funds, Tesla does too.
If it helps with the semantics of the constitution, I suppose this could be a "negative" excise tax rate on automobiles.
In addition, on a more pragmatic level, Congress can't be seen playing favorites with the rust belt states over California... which has more than its fair share of political power on the national level.
There are several ways to justify this particular action of the government to give out loans, and it certainly is much more clearly something that could be interpreted in the constitution for this as well.
Fine, then just don't screw over Telsa by throwing tax dollars at the other auto companies either.
It is all or nothing. Why should the government get to select some companies for its largess just because they are being managed far worse than a small California start-up?