In countries like Brazil, ethanol has a positive energy balance. It polutes much less than gasoline and it's easily renewable.
Just wondering, is that positive energy balance worked out after they've burned down another big chunk of the Amazon to clear land for the sugar cane? If the land never had anything growing on it to begin with you could be right. Given Brazil's location and appalling record of deforestation, I seriously doubt it.
Was when they lost the ability to write good plots. As far as I'm concerned, the "golden age" of Dr Who was the Tom Baker era. "Seeds of Doom" and "Genesis of the Daleks" were absolute classics - every show ended on a cliffhanger, the stories were original and supporting characters were well developed.
Things started going badly south during the Colin Baker era and the Sylvester McCoy episodes were just awful. What a shame that just as they finally had the ability to create decent special effects the writing fell apart.
Carmack's gotta be one of the smartest programmers who's ever lived, but Armadillo are a long, long way from getting the X Prize. Let alone a moon mission.
Sure, they've got the engine working and the videos of the hovering chair are a great achievment. But so far they haven't even flown anything as high as 2 stories. There's a shitload of issues you need to deal with once you truly get going - massive drops in temperature and pressure affecting the engine, increases in radiation affecting electical systems, possible losses of communications and, most importantly, the general aerodynamics of the vehicle which haven't been tested at all.
Have you seen the thing? It looks like a pool filter with an engine on it! Re-entry in particular strikes me as their biggest hurdle. At that speed, even the slightest design flaws with the shape of the vehicle will have it tumbling or spinning at very high G's.
I think Carmack's dismissal of Rutan, "I have always contended that being an "airplane guy" is going to hurt Rutan in the X-Prize" somes up his underestimation of the problem. Understanding airfoil design is essential to get through the atmosphere safely. It's particularly unforgiving at high speed and you need to get through it, twice, and faster than the speed of sound in order to win the X-Prize. They're nowhere near that point.
I'm not usually one to spring to Microsoft's defense, but the spam filtering on Hotmail has improved significantly. I don't pay for the 'premium' service either.
I used to get about 50 spam messages a day and around 10 of those would go into my inbox. Now it's more like 2-3 a day which almost always go into Junk. I can live with that.
Great opportunity to mend ties with the French. They're quite comfortable with nuclear power and if there's any opposition, they could always launch from some radioactive atoll in the South Pacific where they demonstrably don't give a f*ck. Only loss of life will be fish choking on the exhaust of the Rainbow Warrier as they protest about the environmental consequences. Unless of course the French sink them before they get there - again.
Military spending is a very effective form of public subsidy. Why? Because the economic effect of funding the defence industry is a more highly skilled workforce and support by proxy of other high-tech industries with civilian applications eg. Aviation. So funding for a Mars program isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I'd like to see the money come out of the defence budget to fund it.
Personally, I think the money would be best spent on fusion research first. There are several reasons:
1. The urgent need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, the middle east, reduce global warming and pollution in general
2. We obviously have to get fusion working before even thinking about mining the moon for fuel. And once on the moon (or Mars) fusion would be an excellent power source
3. Fusion powered rockets will get us to Mars and elsewhere in the solar system much faster than chemical rockets
Another thing we've gotta get right first is closed ecosystems or biospheres. eg. Growing food, recycling air and water etc. They had a pretty good crack at it a few years ago with Biosphere 2, but IIRC there were problems with oxygen being absorbed into the concrete foundations. So again, they've got to get that right before sending anyone out to the moon or Mars to live on a base. You could do a nice simulation by putting a biosphere underwater, far enough down to reduce the sunlight to the same intensity as Mars. Then check which plants are best able to grow and produce oxygen.
How many of the September 11 terrorists had their fingerprints on file and would have been detected by this system? I suspect none.
But there's one group you'll definately start keeping out, and that's tourists. Why risk having your flight cancelled or getting turned around at the airport from a false fingerprint reading when you can just go somewhere else? It'd be interesting to look at the numbers of say, Canadian vs US ski resort visitors over the next few years.
There's a nice alternative to XForms that's working today on most browsers - The qForms JavaScript API. Easy to use and open source under the GNU Lesser GPL.
XForms sounds great, but as many have pointed out it's useless unless it's supported by the majority of browsers. Now that browsers are a pretty mature technology, people aren't upgrading as often. So I can't see that critical mass of support arriving any time soon.
The best bet at this stage is liquid hydrogen. Airbus are already looking into it.
It won't be completely clean though, there'll still be some nitrogen oxides (leading to acid rain) produced from combustion with the air. The other down side is they'll need bigger tanks because liquid hydrogen occupies significantly more volume than Kerosene, despite having greater power density.
Way too heavy to carry on board and not really the right way to use a flywheel. They're great for providing short bursts of acceleration, but the constant drag on a propellor would stop a flywheel pretty quick. They're better in cars where weight is less of a problem and you can efficiently spin them up again with regenerative braking.
However, you could definately power up a ground based flywheel from the plane's solar panels. It could then winch the plane up to takeoff speed and possibly the first few 1000ft where maximum power is required.
Sega SC3000 with rubber keys!
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First Computers
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Z80A processor & tape drive. It had plug-in cartridges of games + a BASIC cartridge with about 16K of RAM. The BASIC was actually pretty good, with a lot more commands than the C64. But rubber keys man, what were they thinking?! I figure the designers were also into leather...
Having Burt Rutan in charge is the real key here. Design costs? He's probably the best aircraft designer alive and he's doing it for fun. Fabrication costs? Scaled have been producing experimental composite aircraft for years. They have their own CAD/CAM system and an autoclave to produce parts. They also have a highly experienced team of test pilots.
The biggest cost for them will be the rocket system which they had to contract out. For the most part though, the whole production is a side benefit of all the commercial and government work that funds Scaled. So in some ways there's still a government subsidy of sorts in there.
There was an interesting story in The Age that followed up on stories of "breakthroughs" in cancer treatment.
How many times do you hear of a "medical breakthrough" that requires more research but will lead to treatments in, perhaps, 10 years. That 10 year figure gets trotted out a lot.
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Just wondering, is that positive energy balance worked out after they've burned down another big chunk of the Amazon to clear land for the sugar cane? If the land never had anything growing on it to begin with you could be right. Given Brazil's location and appalling record of deforestation, I seriously doubt it.
Which is why it was so disappointing when they lost the ability to write cliffhanger endings. That's been a staple of radio series writing.
Things started going badly south during the Colin Baker era and the Sylvester McCoy episodes were just awful. What a shame that just as they finally had the ability to create decent special effects the writing fell apart.
Sure, they've got the engine working and the videos of the hovering chair are a great achievment. But so far they haven't even flown anything as high as 2 stories. There's a shitload of issues you need to deal with once you truly get going - massive drops in temperature and pressure affecting the engine, increases in radiation affecting electical systems, possible losses of communications and, most importantly, the general aerodynamics of the vehicle which haven't been tested at all.
Have you seen the thing? It looks like a pool filter with an engine on it! Re-entry in particular strikes me as their biggest hurdle. At that speed, even the slightest design flaws with the shape of the vehicle will have it tumbling or spinning at very high G's.
I think Carmack's dismissal of Rutan, "I have always contended that being an "airplane guy" is going to hurt Rutan in the X-Prize" somes up his underestimation of the problem. Understanding airfoil design is essential to get through the atmosphere safely. It's particularly unforgiving at high speed and you need to get through it, twice, and faster than the speed of sound in order to win the X-Prize. They're nowhere near that point.
I used to get about 50 spam messages a day and around 10 of those would go into my inbox. Now it's more like 2-3 a day which almost always go into Junk. I can live with that.
Great opportunity to mend ties with the French. They're quite comfortable with nuclear power and if there's any opposition, they could always launch from some radioactive atoll in the South Pacific where they demonstrably don't give a f*ck. Only loss of life will be fish choking on the exhaust of the Rainbow Warrier as they protest about the environmental consequences. Unless of course the French sink them before they get there - again.
Personally, I think the money would be best spent on fusion research first. There are several reasons:
1. The urgent need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, the middle east, reduce global warming and pollution in general
2. We obviously have to get fusion working before even thinking about mining the moon for fuel. And once on the moon (or Mars) fusion would be an excellent power source
3. Fusion powered rockets will get us to Mars and elsewhere in the solar system much faster than chemical rockets
Another thing we've gotta get right first is closed ecosystems or biospheres. eg. Growing food, recycling air and water etc. They had a pretty good crack at it a few years ago with Biosphere 2, but IIRC there were problems with oxygen being absorbed into the concrete foundations. So again, they've got to get that right before sending anyone out to the moon or Mars to live on a base. You could do a nice simulation by putting a biosphere underwater, far enough down to reduce the sunlight to the same intensity as Mars. Then check which plants are best able to grow and produce oxygen.
By nightfall your country will be teeming with orcs!
But there's one group you'll definately start keeping out, and that's tourists. Why risk having your flight cancelled or getting turned around at the airport from a false fingerprint reading when you can just go somewhere else? It'd be interesting to look at the numbers of say, Canadian vs US ski resort visitors over the next few years.
XForms sounds great, but as many have pointed out it's useless unless it's supported by the majority of browsers. Now that browsers are a pretty mature technology, people aren't upgrading as often. So I can't see that critical mass of support arriving any time soon.
It won't be completely clean though, there'll still be some nitrogen oxides (leading to acid rain) produced from combustion with the air. The other down side is they'll need bigger tanks because liquid hydrogen occupies significantly more volume than Kerosene, despite having greater power density.
However, you could definately power up a ground based flywheel from the plane's solar panels. It could then winch the plane up to takeoff speed and possibly the first few 1000ft where maximum power is required.
Z80A processor & tape drive. It had plug-in cartridges of games + a BASIC cartridge with about 16K of RAM. The BASIC was actually pretty good, with a lot more commands than the C64. But rubber keys man, what were they thinking?! I figure the designers were also into leather...
First he gets fuel to fly from Antarctica back to New Zealand and now this :)
You'd have to be pretty unlucky to hit anything of value in the Mojave Desert. They just need to stay away from Erin Brokovich's house ;-)
The biggest cost for them will be the rocket system which they had to contract out. For the most part though, the whole production is a side benefit of all the commercial and government work that funds Scaled. So in some ways there's still a government subsidy of sorts in there.
How many times do you hear of a "medical breakthrough" that requires more research but will lead to treatments in, perhaps, 10 years. That 10 year figure gets trotted out a lot.
Macromedia's purchase of Allaire wasn't bad. They're doing some interesting stuff with the combined product lines.