If you kill off a 20 man crew every week it's going to be hard to get anything done. A project like this would take 10's if not 100's of people working everyday for a few months most of which would die vary quickly if they did not take proper safety precautions.
It's a lot harder to build a dirty bomb than it is to build a simple atomic bomb.
Sorry, I was thinking about AOL when I was writing that. Basic question what the liabilities of say AOL if someone hacked an IM account. I think a simple demonstration should suffice to ban an account. AKA if that account's log lists a personal phone number and they call the posted number whoever answers that number should be able to cancel the account.
Now for a system like Yahoo's where you can post content then they clearly need to be able to take down said content if was kiddy porn or Classified information. So they have some level of liability. I hope this court case clears up what hosts are required to do and would be fine with either verdict but Yahoo is going to get some bad press if more people start doing this.
PS: He win? I think their separate cases even if she lost vs. him Yahoo might still lose their case vs. her.
Uranium is nasty stuff and you can make a dirty bomb out of it but by the time you have a system in place to get highly concentrated uranium in large quantizes you are already close to building a working bomb. Let's say you where to build a 50lb uranium bomb well you need to have varied good containment and transportation facilities or most of your workforce is going to be dead before you complete the project. You also need to shield the bomb's electronics or it's got a reasonable chance to blow up before you move it to your target area or simply fail to detonate at all. It can still be done, but there are a lot easer targets to do an equivalent amount of damage with less risk and way less cost.
PS: Most city's are poor targets for simple dirty bombs as they have a drainage system that will remove most of the contaminated dust after it rains.
He used said information as part of a larger act of fraud so he is clearly liable. He might have been allowed to post those pics and that information but he also impersonated him in chat sessions to get men to show up at her office thinking they where going to have sex with her.
Now AOL might not be required to take down her pictures and / or contact information but clearly letting him continue to use there system for months after they had been notified he was committing fraud with their system exposes them to some risk.
IMO 3mil seems like a reasonable level of compensation for an organization that willfully allowed such level of harassment to continue for months. It's not like she is trying to get them to verify all information in their system just to have a system to take information down in the event it's misused. Think of the risk they would be taking if the pictures where of a 13 year old and they waited months to take them down.
Getting to space with less cost would be cool but it's really not that expensive right now we just don't have much reason to go there. People look at huge rockets and say wow think how expensive that fuel is but fuel is a low percentage of the cost of going to space. The real costs are in the R&D and the cost of highly skilled people to build and maintain these systems.
To paraphrase an old economic saying the first Pentium IV cost 20 billion$ the second cost 20$. It's the same with going to space but most of these systems are one time deals with vary little real reuse so we keep paying billions because we only build 1-10 of something vs. building 100's or 1000's.
PS: When your car breaks down your right their so why can't you fix it? Just having people there does little you still need to ship the parts their and teach someone how to fix it.
It did not say, but I think they are separating the condensation stage from the irrigation stage. If they use cold water underground to irrigate with they can reduce the amount of evaporation by lowering the plant / ground temperature without trying to condense moisture from the air near the plant.
Anyway, the problem with your fathers system is he was removing the heat from the ground with a system that dropped below freezing. The water in their system starts at around 37F so it's not going to freeze anything.
In low income areas something like 30% of children are born to fathers other than those their mothers pretend to be the child's father. I know it's an odd statistic but basically these women are getting pregnant from "random" people in the population. Now look for the people in those areas who are getting the most A** they tend to be better looking more social and more intelligent than the average people in that group. Yes, many of these people are socially "without these qualities" but genetically they are doing vary well.
Look at Bill Clinton he is intelligent (vs. average person) good looking and socially skilled and he got a TUN of a**. Now in areas with lower socio economic levels you find the same thing with football stars ect. Think back to HS Football players / healthy people got more a** than normal. The "dumb" football players got less a** than the smart ones. The "smooth operators" got more ass than the socially inept ones.
There are variations on this in most social groups. Yes, many smart good looking people don't have any children but when you start talking about large groups these things help.
Yes, socio economic level has a negative impact on number of children but just looking at J W Bush you can see intelligence and socio economic level are not correlated as strongly as you might hope. My father came from a low socio economic level. His IQ is upper 150's took test twice got 157 and 159. From old pictures the man way vary good looking. He was also a smooth operator. It always bothered me as a child but he would say things like "I hated moving there because I had gotten so used to having sex that cutting back to 2-3 times a week was a pain for the first few months till I got the swing of things." Now I know he has at least 4 kids at this point one in the 60's, with his first wife and 3 with my mother who he is still married to but chances are good that there is at least one illegitimate child out there.
On the whole most people in the US have ~1.05 kids per person (2 kids / 2 parents = 1 child per parent ect.) but lot's of people are way above average and in most cases it's not because they and their wife have 4 kids. His wife might have 4 kids but chances are good that he only has 2-3.
This is counter balanced on some social issues like Religion but Religion has minimal relationship to your DNA.
Basically yes. Evolution does not care what you or I think is the right path it's the people who breed that count. Or I should say the fact that your great great great... Child is still around. It's not enough to have kids those kids need to have kids ect until the end of time.
I think a base level of intelligence is selected for as the severely retarded are less likely to have kids than the average people but I think it's the smart good looking people that are most selected for. Think of how many upper class guys have knocked up their secretary's or whatever and notice how all your children count and I don't think it's a grim a picture as you think it is.
Looks
Immune system
Basic intelligence
Social Skills
These are the traits that seem to be most heavily selected for in our society. And sorry if everyone becoming good-looking, healthy, reasonably intelligent, and social seems to horrify you.
Cool links. The first one had some good info like: "The solution consists of a number of four-cell PVLS situated round the perimeter of the deck, rather than the usual centrally located VLS"
But the last part was so bad it's sick.
While rail guns do not suffer from the traditional recoil forces associated with conventional expanding gas weapons, this repulsive effect can be equally destructive if not properly compensated for.
Umm, No cool new guns still need to obey the laws of physics. Yea there is less recoil because you only accelerating the bullet not the bullet plus gas but it's still there.
Thinking about this I released why you kept thinking real world has dust so making a useful mirror to deflect laser light would be hard. Anyway, I tried to write this without assuming you knew anything about optics it's a little longer than I was looking for but it gets my point across.
First off no type of defense is total but if you can make one target 20x as hard to destroy you have made a vary effective defense. Anyway, in a laboratory situation you have thin high-energy lasers bouncing around and you need to make a lot of effort to keep the beams from destroying the mirrors. But what your missing is that these mirrors are vary different from normal mirrors. If you look at a pane of glass at a 45 degree angle it's going to reflect around 50% of incoming light and let the rest pass though it. Now when looking out a window most of the time this is not a big deal as the outside is vary bright and your looking straight at most of the time so it's not a big deal but if it's vary bright outside you can sometimes see windows that look like mirrors.
But mirrors can be made out of things beside glass. Now as you have probably noticed many things can act as good mirrors when they're a polished surface. Now a simple hand mirror is actually both it's a thin film on the other side of glass so the glass surface can get scratched but the mirror still works well. However, if you wanted to use something like that to reflect a laser at a 45deg angle you end up with 2 beams that are close together (the glass is acting as a beam splitter and the silver coating is reflecting the rest of the beam. Now to prevent this laser mirrors put the reflective part on top of the glass so you can keep a single beam.
Now let's think about a laser that's cutting though a block of steel with a hand mirror vs. a laser mirror. Well with the laser mirror your going to reflect a lot of light but that dust is going to heat up destroy the coating pass though the glass and burn though the steel but the mirror would still have defected a lot of incoming energy but it acts like X incoming energy - mirrors ability to reflect light. So up to a point the mirror is blocking all energy then it becomes useless. Anyway with a hand mirror you have 2 layers. If a particle of dust lands on the top layer then it's going to super heat the glass but superheated glass is still vary transparent and the bottom layer is only effected when the heat from the glass passes to that layer. Now depending on how thick the glass is that lower level coating could last a while. Remember it's the heat from the glass that needs to pass though not the light as all (ok 99.somthing) the light that hits that coating is sill being reflected.
Note: This is a vary complex process as it depends on how high energy the laser is, how long it lasts, what frequency's it operates at, how thick the glass is ect but that simple hand mirror is going to block a lot of energy. You also have other effects going on but it's not like high-energy lasers will instantly destroy anything in its path. Yea if the numbers get high you can break just about anything but even though you could accelerate a single atom fast enough it's got the kinetic energy of a Mac truck doing 60 that does not mean it's relevant to think about a mole (6.02 * 10 ^23 atoms / ~107grams) of lead going that fast. Yea it would destroy just about anything but so would tossing a black hole at it does not mean it can be done.
What is it with you and point defense rail guns? Rail guns suck for point defense in comparison to beam weapons. The type of Rail Gun you want is only useful for things like tanks or anti-aircraft fire.
Ok, this has gotten to be a fairly long discussion so I am going to recap my points to make sure we are on the same page.
Ion weapons have a really short range. But are of little use over a few 100 feet in the atmosphere. (Don't know if we talked about them. But they clearly suck inside an atmosphere. )
Lasers are not vary energy efferent, are easy to defend (up to a point) and are not well suited for combat situations.
Needle gun / High velocity rail guns are well suited for short-range use as long as they have a good power supply to work from.
Now when the navy wanted to build a catapult system to launch aircraft used a seam system, as it's extremely reliable and efferent. The point I am trying to make is Needle guns are more efferent and reliable than lasers. Yes the rails only last so long but they're easily replaced. Where a large laser with a minor problem is going to be hell to fix. Add to that the Worm up time of current high energy laser systems (they can't really sit at ready to fire for months at a time.) and it seems like rail guns are a much more reasonable solution for point defense systems. Yea they don't sound as sci-fi but they seem to be a much better solution for ships. Now I can see the advantage on aircraft where having firing ports that stay closed might be an advantage but aircraft use guns now anyway so I don't think it's a real problem.
PS: It was my understanding that we even have working rail gun systems that are waiting for the next generation of aircraft carriers which will have more spare energy for these types of systems. They are not supposed to be huge deck guns but rather closer to the size of a large washer drier unit / small car with a connection to an ammo supply.
The problem with this is code rot. It's faster now but when the DB is 20x as large but your hardware is 200x as fast and you need to change some things your not going to want to mess with low-level data storage issues.
I think the best solution is to have a good administrative system so you can optimize the database based on system load without changing your code. You end up with the old Oracle / DB administrator but you get a highly tooned system that is still portable.
Let's say you have 5,000 backup sectors well once a single sector goes bad it stays that way so if you where to keep them as a list on the drive somewhere you could do all your maping with a single write per area. Aka List 2. 1AF2FA1 > 2FF0000 1AF3341 > 2FF0001 0000000 > 0000000 0000000 > 0000000 ... List 3. 1AF2FA1 > 2FF0000 1AF3341 > 2FF0001 1AF2FA1 > 2FF0002 0000000 > 0000000 ... So your only realy chaging any sector in the bad memory area once. You also only need to read from this area at start up so if you use some simple raid 5 setup on a single disk you should have a vary low falure rait for any given drive.
Fine, you can call it a rail gun, but it is nothing like what a point defense rail gun. They basically modified and existing system so they could use the term "rail gun" and use some of the rail gun funding.
Calling that system a rail gun is like calling an unmanned space shuttle an ICBM yea it's a missile but the connotation of ICBM is that it has one or more atomic bombs on board.
3rd sci - fi No, I'm talking about a scenario that *could* be real because it was based on *real* science. According to *real* science, the largest Orion is 8,000,000 tons (yes, tons, not pounds) using 1960's building technology. The REAL Orion designs are powerful enough to carry a cooling system sufficient to absorb megawatts of energy from REAL laser weapons. A missile cannot carry such a cooling system, because it doesn't have a REAL thrust-to-weight ratio sufficient to carry such a system. Unless we start using REAL Nuclear Thermal Rockets on them, that is.
Your still talking about sci-fi as if it is real.
You can't build a cooling system for a closed system. So we you could heat up some parts of the ship to radiate into space some heat but those would be targets as they would already be "hot". You could shore up some cold say liquid Hydrogen but you don't really have any time to use it. When your fighting weapons that will say ionize 6 inches of steel in under a second keeping that steel at 100degF or -100degF makes little difference it's still going to take the same amount of energy to ionize it. Now if you had hot steel and you wanted to cool it with liquid Nitrogen your going to have problems with cracking and it's still not going to fix any of your holes in the ship as they have been ionized and that steel is now out in space. The simple fact is if any part of your ship was anywhere near the melting point of the material then it would be cooled by radiating to space about as fast as anything you could do with it. The only thing that would help would have a thicker or more reflective hull.
And you would still be unable to defend vs. basic kinetic weapons. 1-ton worth of mass moving at mach 50 is going to do about as much damage if it's one big ball or 50 smaller balls in a tight cluster.
Going to split this into 3 post for each of the ideas 1st off rail guns.
You can get some good info on rail guns from. http://www.physics.northwestern.edu/classes/2001Fa ll/Phyx135-2/19/railgun.htm Such as:
Viable rail guns can now be constructed with rails only 1 meter long.
The projectile should have an exit speed of approximately 12km/s in order to successfully intercept missiles. (mach 35.26 ~= 12km/s)
They are working on 150 km/s rail guns which would work at around mach 300. So yea mach 10 is slow for a rail gun.
PS: Granted coil guns seem to work much better and have can get close to C but that's with a single atom.
I think this has more to do with people trying to fit a subject as complex as politics into a two party system.
I think schools are important but taking standardized tests every year is pointless who do I vote for? I think everyone should pay for SS not just those making less than 90k a year who do I vote for? I want to increase funding for fusion research but reduce funding for fuel efferent cars whom do I vote for?
That's hardly rail gun ammo it's a 100lb missile. I guess they can make them a little smaller by not taking as much rocket fuel with them but you can't really shoot something like that out of a gun, as it can't take the acceleration.
If there really using ERGM's then I guess they can call it a rail gun if all it's doing is tossing it up in the air a few hundred feet but it's not the rapid fire kinetic weapon people think of when they say rail gun.
While you can "use the same substance" as you suggest, it's doubtful that you could maintain the perfect mirror on the missile, or for that matter even achieve such a mirror.
I am not talking about a "perfect mirror" Let's say I can reflect 95% of incoming energy well you now need a system that's 20x as powerful. Can this be done? Well every part of your system now needs to take 20x the load including that targeting mirror. As to Masers you need to have 2 to 4 of them to cover each section of the ship. And they now need to swivel fast enough to take out 3 targets in under a second. And we are talking about moving 100's of Tuns of stuff at those speeds. Depending on the frequencies I can still reflect some of that energy but lets say they only need to be 5x as powerful.
Now let's place these things on a battle ship. Well a dumb kinetic bomb that is filled with paint can take them all out. It's not explosive so hitting it wit a laser is not going to do much. And it's a kinetic weapon so shooting it is not going to do anything. A fine mist of pant on the outside glass of your Masers is going to break said system after a single fire. Yep, it adds a new arms race but not much of one at that and your spending BILLIONS to build something that a can of paint can break.
This could still be done but we are a long way from any system that comes anywhere near this level. Lasers sound cool but a rail / coil gun is much more useful at point defense. And even still these systems are useless vs. the WWII method of shooting a few ton's of led out of a gun at your ship.
As I said "unless there moving at slow speeds at which point you can just use gun powder to do that"
These are all low velocity rounds. Note: Mach 10 is slow when you're talking about rail guns.
The idea behind rail guns is you can take a 1lb iron dart and fire though 10 feet of carbon steel so you can then keep 20 tunes of said darts in less space and with less danger than you could other types of ammo. These systems are based using more massage darts, which either use an explosive head to penetrate the target or the weight of the dart. But as I said these systems could use gun powder they are not the "rail gun weapons" your thinking of as they are no better off than normal guns.
PS:
Except when it's not.
" the ship was only able to carry such a system because it was a heavily overpowered Orion warship. (It carried several space shuttles up into space with it.)"
Your talking about sci-fi as if it real. It's not. You can't say look at what this fact sheet says because it's sci-fi. It's like saying "If you could take all the energy from the sun for 2-3 seconds you could cut a one inch hole though the earth" And then point at that and saying see you can cut a one inch hole though the earth. If you sit there and think about the logic you can see why saying "if I can do A then I can do B" does not mean you can do B.
SCI-FI is fiction. Please say that again and again till it starts to sink in.
Yes, Masers can use wavelengths higher than visible light but if your going to use some sort of mirror to target your system then clearly you can use that type of mirror to reflect that energy at 99+% efficiency. At this point in time your talking about a hypothetical system so feel free to pick any part of the EM Spectrum and you can find it's going to be a pain to use as either you need to rapidly swivel your laser system or you going to lose a lot of energy as it passes though the air or you can use the same substance used in your mirrors to make a missile immune to said system.
You can't fire rail guns over the horizon as they a lose a lot of kinetic energy going tough the air and don't don't have ballistic trajectories unless there moving at slow speeds at which point you can just use gun powder to do that.
2) Our ever expanding knowledge doesn't contribute to evolution so much as prevent it. We keep the non-survivor types alive and encourage them to breed.
That does not stop evolution. All it does is increase the amount of mutations that the average person has. Chances are things like immunity to disease require periods where the species is under little evolutionary presser so we can develop a wider range of defense systems. On a side not suicide is an evolutionary pressure so are we going to end up being happier over time?
We have already simulated a simple brain before. Granted this a simple worm with 12 or so neurons but it's hard to point out why if it works with 12 you can't go to 12k, 12m or 12b.
At some point it just comes down to how accurate you method for decoding a brain is and how much processing power we get to use. I think we could build a computer network that was about as smart as a person right now but I still think it's 20+ years till the first simulated rat brain shows up.
Not true! It has been observed in a species of sunfish.a researcher I know is doing his dissertation on speciation within the pumpkinseed sunfish. The litoral and benthic varieties in several Northern lakes are splitting off with the result that the body shape, feeding and breeding habits are changing. The 2 groups do not interbreed and when crossbred the resulting offspring are sterile.
Speciation is the process where separated populations diverge over time. THIS HAS BEEN OBSERVED.
You're basically saying you can't count from one to 10,000 even though you can count from one to 100, 100 to 200 ECT. Step one separate populations, watch breed splits occur, step the watch as breeds have an increasingly difficult time interbreeding. Once two groups of animals can't produce viable offspring there different species. (This has been seen.)
People in the US have not been doing significant embryonic stem cell research for a while. People are still doing novel research with them outside the US.
We tossed a few billion at adult stem cells and we got some interesting results. We have fewer results from embryonic stem cells because we have done less research from them not because they're less promising. It's that simple.
There is no value in abandoning promising lines of research ever. We don't know what we will find out so we should use all tools available. When scientists decide there no longer useful then we can abandon them but it's been a political decision and it's harming America by causing scientists to abandon the US to follow promising lines of research.
PS: People did research the vacuum tube after we had transistors. We stopped because transistors where clearly better after a while not because it was obvious that transistors where better after the first transistors showed up.
Slashdot Mirror
If you kill off a 20 man crew every week it's going to be hard to get anything done. A project like this would take 10's if not 100's of people working everyday for a few months most of which would die vary quickly if they did not take proper safety precautions.
It's a lot harder to build a dirty bomb than it is to build a simple atomic bomb.
Ops it's Yahoo Inc.
Sorry, I was thinking about AOL when I was writing that. Basic question what the liabilities of say AOL if someone hacked an IM account. I think a simple demonstration should suffice to ban an account. AKA if that account's log lists a personal phone number and they call the posted number whoever answers that number should be able to cancel the account.
Now for a system like Yahoo's where you can post content then they clearly need to be able to take down said content if was kiddy porn or Classified information. So they have some level of liability. I hope this court case clears up what hosts are required to do and would be fine with either verdict but Yahoo is going to get some bad press if more people start doing this.
PS: He win? I think their separate cases even if she lost vs. him Yahoo might still lose their case vs. her.
Uranium is nasty stuff and you can make a dirty bomb out of it but by the time you have a system in place to get highly concentrated uranium in large quantizes you are already close to building a working bomb. Let's say you where to build a 50lb uranium bomb well you need to have varied good containment and transportation facilities or most of your workforce is going to be dead before you complete the project. You also need to shield the bomb's electronics or it's got a reasonable chance to blow up before you move it to your target area or simply fail to detonate at all. It can still be done, but there are a lot easer targets to do an equivalent amount of damage with less risk and way less cost.
PS: Most city's are poor targets for simple dirty bombs as they have a drainage system that will remove most of the contaminated dust after it rains.
He used said information as part of a larger act of fraud so he is clearly liable. He might have been allowed to post those pics and that information but he also impersonated him in chat sessions to get men to show up at her office thinking they where going to have sex with her.
Now AOL might not be required to take down her pictures and / or contact information but clearly letting him continue to use there system for months after they had been notified he was committing fraud with their system exposes them to some risk.
IMO 3mil seems like a reasonable level of compensation for an organization that willfully allowed such level of harassment to continue for months. It's not like she is trying to get them to verify all information in their system just to have a system to take information down in the event it's misused. Think of the risk they would be taking if the pictures where of a 13 year old and they waited months to take them down.
Getting to space with less cost would be cool but it's really not that expensive right now we just don't have much reason to go there. People look at huge rockets and say wow think how expensive that fuel is but fuel is a low percentage of the cost of going to space. The real costs are in the R&D and the cost of highly skilled people to build and maintain these systems.
To paraphrase an old economic saying the first Pentium IV cost 20 billion$ the second cost 20$. It's the same with going to space but most of these systems are one time deals with vary little real reuse so we keep paying billions because we only build 1-10 of something vs. building 100's or 1000's.
PS: When your car breaks down your right their so why can't you fix it? Just having people there does little you still need to ship the parts their and teach someone how to fix it.
It did not say, but I think they are separating the condensation stage from the irrigation stage. If they use cold water underground to irrigate with they can reduce the amount of evaporation by lowering the plant / ground temperature without trying to condense moisture from the air near the plant.
Anyway, the problem with your fathers system is he was removing the heat from the ground with a system that dropped below freezing. The water in their system starts at around 37F so it's not going to freeze anything.
In low income areas something like 30% of children are born to fathers other than those their mothers pretend to be the child's father. I know it's an odd statistic but basically these women are getting pregnant from "random" people in the population. Now look for the people in those areas who are getting the most A** they tend to be better looking more social and more intelligent than the average people in that group. Yes, many of these people are socially "without these qualities" but genetically they are doing vary well.
Look at Bill Clinton he is intelligent (vs. average person) good looking and socially skilled and he got a TUN of a**. Now in areas with lower socio economic levels you find the same thing with football stars ect. Think back to HS Football players / healthy people got more a** than normal. The "dumb" football players got less a** than the smart ones. The "smooth operators" got more ass than the socially inept ones.
There are variations on this in most social groups. Yes, many smart good looking people don't have any children but when you start talking about large groups these things help.
Yes, socio economic level has a negative impact on number of children but just looking at J W Bush you can see intelligence and socio economic level are not correlated as strongly as you might hope. My father came from a low socio economic level. His IQ is upper 150's took test twice got 157 and 159. From old pictures the man way vary good looking. He was also a smooth operator. It always bothered me as a child but he would say things like "I hated moving there because I had gotten so used to having sex that cutting back to 2-3 times a week was a pain for the first few months till I got the swing of things." Now I know he has at least 4 kids at this point one in the 60's, with his first wife and 3 with my mother who he is still married to but chances are good that there is at least one illegitimate child out there.
On the whole most people in the US have ~1.05 kids per person (2 kids / 2 parents = 1 child per parent ect.) but lot's of people are way above average and in most cases it's not because they and their wife have 4 kids. His wife might have 4 kids but chances are good that he only has 2-3.
This is counter balanced on some social issues like Religion but Religion has minimal relationship to your DNA.
Basically yes. Evolution does not care what you or I think is the right path it's the people who breed that count. Or I should say the fact that your great great great ... Child is still around. It's not enough to have kids those kids need to have kids ect until the end of time.
I think a base level of intelligence is selected for as the severely retarded are less likely to have kids than the average people but I think it's the smart good looking people that are most selected for. Think of how many upper class guys have knocked up their secretary's or whatever and notice how all your children count and I don't think it's a grim a picture as you think it is.
Looks
Immune system
Basic intelligence
Social Skills
These are the traits that seem to be most heavily selected for in our society. And sorry if everyone becoming good-looking, healthy, reasonably intelligent, and social seems to horrify you.
Cool links. The first one had some good info like: "The solution consists of a number of four-cell PVLS situated round the perimeter of the deck, rather than the usual centrally located VLS"
But the last part was so bad it's sick.
While rail guns do not suffer from the traditional recoil forces associated with conventional expanding gas weapons, this repulsive effect can be equally destructive if not properly compensated for.
Umm, No cool new guns still need to obey the laws of physics. Yea there is less recoil because you only accelerating the bullet not the bullet plus gas but it's still there.
Thinking about this I released why you kept thinking real world has dust so making a useful mirror to deflect laser light would be hard. Anyway, I tried to write this without assuming you knew anything about optics it's a little longer than I was looking for but it gets my point across.
First off no type of defense is total but if you can make one target 20x as hard to destroy you have made a vary effective defense. Anyway, in a laboratory situation you have thin high-energy lasers bouncing around and you need to make a lot of effort to keep the beams from destroying the mirrors. But what your missing is that these mirrors are vary different from normal mirrors. If you look at a pane of glass at a 45 degree angle it's going to reflect around 50% of incoming light and let the rest pass though it. Now when looking out a window most of the time this is not a big deal as the outside is vary bright and your looking straight at most of the time so it's not a big deal but if it's vary bright outside you can sometimes see windows that look like mirrors.
But mirrors can be made out of things beside glass. Now as you have probably noticed many things can act as good mirrors when they're a polished surface. Now a simple hand mirror is actually both it's a thin film on the other side of glass so the glass surface can get scratched but the mirror still works well. However, if you wanted to use something like that to reflect a laser at a 45deg angle you end up with 2 beams that are close together (the glass is acting as a beam splitter and the silver coating is reflecting the rest of the beam. Now to prevent this laser mirrors put the reflective part on top of the glass so you can keep a single beam.
Now let's think about a laser that's cutting though a block of steel with a hand mirror vs. a laser mirror. Well with the laser mirror your going to reflect a lot of light but that dust is going to heat up destroy the coating pass though the glass and burn though the steel but the mirror would still have defected a lot of incoming energy but it acts like X incoming energy - mirrors ability to reflect light. So up to a point the mirror is blocking all energy then it becomes useless. Anyway with a hand mirror you have 2 layers. If a particle of dust lands on the top layer then it's going to super heat the glass but superheated glass is still vary transparent and the bottom layer is only effected when the heat from the glass passes to that layer. Now depending on how thick the glass is that lower level coating could last a while. Remember it's the heat from the glass that needs to pass though not the light as all (ok 99.somthing) the light that hits that coating is sill being reflected.
Note: This is a vary complex process as it depends on how high energy the laser is, how long it lasts, what frequency's it operates at, how thick the glass is ect but that simple hand mirror is going to block a lot of energy. You also have other effects going on but it's not like high-energy lasers will instantly destroy anything in its path. Yea if the numbers get high you can break just about anything but even though you could accelerate a single atom fast enough it's got the kinetic energy of a Mac truck doing 60 that does not mean it's relevant to think about a mole (6.02 * 10 ^23 atoms / ~107grams) of lead going that fast. Yea it would destroy just about anything but so would tossing a black hole at it does not mean it can be done.
What is it with you and point defense rail guns? Rail guns suck for point defense in comparison to beam weapons. The type of Rail Gun you want is only useful for things like tanks or anti-aircraft fire.
Ok, this has gotten to be a fairly long discussion so I am going to recap my points to make sure we are on the same page.
Ion weapons have a really short range. But are of little use over a few 100 feet in the atmosphere. (Don't know if we talked about them. But they clearly suck inside an atmosphere. )
Lasers are not vary energy efferent, are easy to defend (up to a point) and are not well suited for combat situations.
Needle gun / High velocity rail guns are well suited for short-range use as long as they have a good power supply to work from.
Now when the navy wanted to build a catapult system to launch aircraft used a seam system, as it's extremely reliable and efferent. The point I am trying to make is Needle guns are more efferent and reliable than lasers. Yes the rails only last so long but they're easily replaced. Where a large laser with a minor problem is going to be hell to fix. Add to that the Worm up time of current high energy laser systems (they can't really sit at ready to fire for months at a time.) and it seems like rail guns are a much more reasonable solution for point defense systems. Yea they don't sound as sci-fi but they seem to be a much better solution for ships. Now I can see the advantage on aircraft where having firing ports that stay closed might be an advantage but aircraft use guns now anyway so I don't think it's a real problem.
PS: It was my understanding that we even have working rail gun systems that are waiting for the next generation of aircraft carriers which will have more spare energy for these types of systems. They are not supposed to be huge deck guns but rather closer to the size of a large washer drier unit / small car with a connection to an ammo supply.
The problem with this is code rot. It's faster now but when the DB is 20x as large but your hardware is 200x as fast and you need to change some things your not going to want to mess with low-level data storage issues.
I think the best solution is to have a good administrative system so you can optimize the database based on system load without changing your code. You end up with the old Oracle / DB administrator but you get a highly tooned system that is still portable.
Let's say you have 5,000 backup sectors well once a single sector goes bad it stays that way so if you where to keep them as a list on the drive somewhere you could do all your maping with a single write per area. Aka
List 2.
1AF2FA1 > 2FF0000
1AF3341 > 2FF0001
0000000 > 0000000
0000000 > 0000000
...
List 3.
1AF2FA1 > 2FF0000
1AF3341 > 2FF0001
1AF2FA1 > 2FF0002
0000000 > 0000000
...
So your only realy chaging any sector in the bad memory area once. You also only need to read from this area at start up so if you use some simple raid 5 setup on a single disk you should have a vary low falure rait for any given drive.
Fine, you can call it a rail gun, but it is nothing like what a point defense rail gun. They basically modified and existing system so they could use the term "rail gun" and use some of the rail gun funding.
Calling that system a rail gun is like calling an unmanned space shuttle an ICBM yea it's a missile but the connotation of ICBM is that it has one or more atomic bombs on board.
3rd sci - fi
No, I'm talking about a scenario that *could* be real because it was based on *real* science. According to *real* science, the largest Orion is 8,000,000 tons (yes, tons, not pounds) using 1960's building technology. The REAL Orion designs are powerful enough to carry a cooling system sufficient to absorb megawatts of energy from REAL laser weapons. A missile cannot carry such a cooling system, because it doesn't have a REAL thrust-to-weight ratio sufficient to carry such a system. Unless we start using REAL Nuclear Thermal Rockets on them, that is.
Your still talking about sci-fi as if it is real.
You can't build a cooling system for a closed system. So we you could heat up some parts of the ship to radiate into space some heat but those would be targets as they would already be "hot". You could shore up some cold say liquid Hydrogen but you don't really have any time to use it. When your fighting weapons that will say ionize 6 inches of steel in under a second keeping that steel at 100degF or -100degF makes little difference it's still going to take the same amount of energy to ionize it. Now if you had hot steel and you wanted to cool it with liquid Nitrogen your going to have problems with cracking and it's still not going to fix any of your holes in the ship as they have been ionized and that steel is now out in space. The simple fact is if any part of your ship was anywhere near the melting point of the material then it would be cooled by radiating to space about as fast as anything you could do with it. The only thing that would help would have a thicker or more reflective hull.
And you would still be unable to defend vs. basic kinetic weapons. 1-ton worth of mass moving at mach 50 is going to do about as much damage if it's one big ball or 50 smaller balls in a tight cluster.
Going to split this into 3 post for each of the ideas 1st off rail guns.
a ll/Phyx135-2/19/railgun.htm
You can get some good info on rail guns from.
http://www.physics.northwestern.edu/classes/2001F
Such as: Viable rail guns can now be constructed with rails only 1 meter long.
The projectile should have an exit speed of approximately 12km/s in order to successfully intercept missiles. (mach 35.26 ~= 12km/s)
They are working on 150 km/s rail guns which would work at around mach 300. So yea mach 10 is slow for a rail gun.
PS: Granted coil guns seem to work much better and have can get close to C but that's with a single atom.
I think this has more to do with people trying to fit a subject as complex as politics into a two party system.
I think schools are important but taking standardized tests every year is pointless who do I vote for? I think everyone should pay for SS not just those making less than 90k a year who do I vote for? I want to increase funding for fusion research but reduce funding for fuel efferent cars whom do I vote for?
That's hardly rail gun ammo it's a 100lb missile. I guess they can make them a little smaller by not taking as much rocket fuel with them but you can't really shoot something like that out of a gun, as it can't take the acceleration.
If there really using ERGM's then I guess they can call it a rail gun if all it's doing is tossing it up in the air a few hundred feet but it's not the rapid fire kinetic weapon people think of when they say rail gun.
While you can "use the same substance" as you suggest, it's doubtful that you could maintain the perfect mirror on the missile, or for that matter even achieve such a mirror.
e s_062403.pdfs /8-6263.asp
I am not talking about a "perfect mirror" Let's say I can reflect 95% of incoming energy well you now need a system that's 20x as powerful. Can this be done? Well every part of your system now needs to take 20x the load including that targeting mirror. As to Masers you need to have 2 to 4 of them to cover each section of the ship. And they now need to swivel fast enough to take out 3 targets in under a second. And we are talking about moving 100's of Tuns of stuff at those speeds. Depending on the frequencies I can still reflect some of that energy but lets say they only need to be 5x as powerful.
Now let's place these things on a battle ship. Well a dumb kinetic bomb that is filled with paint can take them all out. It's not explosive so hitting it wit a laser is not going to do much. And it's a kinetic weapon so shooting it is not going to do anything. A fine mist of pant on the outside glass of your Masers is going to break said system after a single fire. Yep, it adds a new arms race but not much of one at that and your spending BILLIONS to build something that a can of paint can break.
This could still be done but we are a long way from any system that comes anywhere near this level. Lasers sound cool but a rail / coil gun is much more useful at point defense. And even still these systems are useless vs. the WWII method of shooting a few ton's of led out of a gun at your ship.
As I said "unless there moving at slow speeds at which point you can just use gun powder to do that"
http://www.navyleague.org/sea_power/may_04_10.php
http://www.raytheon.com/newsroom/articles/ddx_jan
http://www.strategypage.com/messageboards/message
These are all low velocity rounds.
Note: Mach 10 is slow when you're talking about rail guns.
The idea behind rail guns is you can take a 1lb iron dart and fire though 10 feet of carbon steel so you can then keep 20 tunes of said darts in less space and with less danger than you could other types of ammo. These systems are based using more massage darts, which either use an explosive head to penetrate the target or the weight of the dart. But as I said these systems could use gun powder they are not the "rail gun weapons" your thinking of as they are no better off than normal guns.
PS: Except when it's not.
" the ship was only able to carry such a system because it was a heavily overpowered Orion warship. (It carried several space shuttles up into space with it.)"
Your talking about sci-fi as if it real. It's not. You can't say look at what this fact sheet says because it's sci-fi. It's like saying "If you could take all the energy from the sun for 2-3 seconds you could cut a one inch hole though the earth" And then point at that and saying see you can cut a one inch hole though the earth. If you sit there and think about the logic you can see why saying "if I can do A then I can do B" does not mean you can do B.
SCI-FI is fiction. Please say that again and again till it starts to sink in.
Yes, Masers can use wavelengths higher than visible light but if your going to use some sort of mirror to target your system then clearly you can use that type of mirror to reflect that energy at 99+% efficiency. At this point in time your talking about a hypothetical system so feel free to pick any part of the EM Spectrum and you can find it's going to be a pain to use as either you need to rapidly swivel your laser system or you going to lose a lot of energy as it passes though the air or you can use the same substance used in your mirrors to make a missile immune to said system.
You can't fire rail guns over the horizon as they a lose a lot of kinetic energy going tough the air and don't don't have ballistic trajectories unless there moving at slow speeds at which point you can just use gun powder to do that.
2) Our ever expanding knowledge doesn't contribute to evolution so much as prevent it. We keep the non-survivor types alive and encourage them to breed.
That does not stop evolution. All it does is increase the amount of mutations that the average person has. Chances are things like immunity to disease require periods where the species is under little evolutionary presser so we can develop a wider range of defense systems. On a side not suicide is an evolutionary pressure so are we going to end up being happier over time?
We have already simulated a simple brain before. Granted this a simple worm with 12 or so neurons but it's hard to point out why if it works with 12 you can't go to 12k, 12m or 12b.
At some point it just comes down to how accurate you method for decoding a brain is and how much processing power we get to use. I think we could build a computer network that was about as smart as a person right now but I still think it's 20+ years till the first simulated rat brain shows up.
Ok. You spend 200,000,000,000$ making a point defense laser system.
I cover my missiles with a reflective substance for 200$.
WOW sounds like a great idea for me.
PS: You might be able to shoot down aircraft from several miles, but I can launch a missile while over the horizon and still hit you.
I agree, and I would like to thank you for adding more.
Not true! It has been observed in a species of sunfish.a researcher I know is doing his dissertation on speciation within the pumpkinseed sunfish. The litoral and benthic varieties in several Northern lakes are splitting off with the result that the body shape, feeding and breeding habits are changing. The 2 groups do not interbreed and when crossbred the resulting offspring are sterile.
Speciation is the process where separated populations diverge over time. THIS HAS BEEN OBSERVED.
You're basically saying you can't count from one to 10,000 even though you can count from one to 100, 100 to 200 ECT. Step one separate populations, watch breed splits occur, step the watch as breeds have an increasingly difficult time interbreeding. Once two groups of animals can't produce viable offspring there different species. (This has been seen.)
People in the US have not been doing significant embryonic stem cell research for a while. People are still doing novel research with them outside the US.
We tossed a few billion at adult stem cells and we got some interesting results. We have fewer results from embryonic stem cells because we have done less research from them not because they're less promising. It's that simple.
There is no value in abandoning promising lines of research ever. We don't know what we will find out so we should use all tools available. When scientists decide there no longer useful then we can abandon them but it's been a political decision and it's harming America by causing scientists to abandon the US to follow promising lines of research.
PS: People did research the vacuum tube after we had transistors. We stopped because transistors where clearly better after a while not because it was obvious that transistors where better after the first transistors showed up.