I like the Hamster wheel idea. It might just work with fewer environmental negatives than the others have. Hamster can get by on yard waste. How well do Hamsters scale?
If it turns out that it isn't a good idea, we can always feed the hamsters to dogs and then eat the dogs like the Chinese do.
This 'DeRegulation you so fear and hate is not what you think it is.
The Government didn't stop regulating. They haven't done that in the Financial markets since 1912. The Government didn't stop regulating the Mining industry. They haven't done that since the early 1920's. The Government didn't stop regulating telecoms or any of the other monopolies.
What they did was to let the fox guard the henhouse. The Fed is after all a private company run by a few large banks. It should be no surprise that they act to support those same large banks. The fed is in fact overseen by people from the same large banks.
Much the same is true of the Stock Markets and the equities exchanges. Who are the Regulators? Bernie Madoff was one once. Doesn't that give you a nice warm feeling? He was watching out for you. Just like Ken Lay once did.
The same is true for most monopolies. When Microsoft was convicted of antitrust violation under Bush (the trial was started under Clinton), Microsoft was allowed to write the settlement they wanted. Before you start to go and Bushbash, remember that six years earlier, the same thing happened under Clinton. Both sides are equally at fault.
Who regulates the railroads? Railroad executives who are on temporary loan to the Government. Who regulates the Medical field? The Doctors Union (AMA) supplies people to the Federal Government.
The problem isn't that there is no regulation, or that it has been somehow disabled. The problem is in how it is being implemented. Sorry, but we have had that problem all the way back to the Grant Administration in 1868.
The Stock Market was regulated when it crashed in 1929. It just wasn't regulated well. The Banks were regulated in 1930 when so many failed, they just weren't regulated well. The Electrical Energy Markets weren't unregulated when the Enron manipulation caused the collapse of the energy availability market in 2001, it just wasn't regulated well. The Housing Mortgage Market wasn't unregulated when it collapsed in 2009, it just wasn't regulated well.
Some of these were the result of action by the regulated organizations, some were the result of large players who knew what the results would be, and some were the results of acts of Congress. Some were "D. All of the above."
Do you see a pattern here? Perhaps we should consider having someone other than industry insiders or Congressional profit takers doing the regulating?
And so it goes. The Fox really is the Hen house guard. And no one is held responsible.
I think you have Ron Paul confused with Barak Obama. They have different views.
Ron Paul is the one who thinks that half of the government should be abolished. No, not the defense department, though he would like to pare it down to the size that Eisenhower wanted, basically just the sargents and officers (Who will spend most peacetime playing insipid games while the sargents really run the Army like they always do), with a small core of soldiers for the officers to command for the Army, and keep the Navy, though about a third of the ships could be just placed in storage. Air Force about half way between Army and Navy. Marines, they are part of the Navy.
No, it's the rest of the government he would like to be rid of, The IRS, the Welfare, Education and such like departments. Anything that doesn't pay for itself. He believes that around half of what the Federal Government does is unconstitutional. That half is what he really wants to eliminate. He would have no trouble achieving or surpassing President Obama's goal of eliminating 1.4 Trillion Dollars from the Federal Governments budget. He would probably eliminate twice that.
If any of that is wise is another question entirely. So also is the question of if he could actually DO any of it.
Barak Obama on the other hand wants to expand entitlements (Money the Government promises to give people and corporations). He is the candidate that believes that when you are in debt, the way to get out of debt is to spend more money. After all, -1-1=2 right? To be honest, he probably learned this sort of math in the Senate. That is how Senators seem to think. It doesn't appear to matter which Party they officially belong to.
Also, to continue to be honest, Barak Obama like George Bush (2) before him has most of his problems stemming from action outside the US, or from acts of Congress. Like Bush, he is more a victim of the Pelosi-Reid congress than anything else. Presidents get blamed for everything, and they appear to have a great deal of power, but reality is that they mostly respond to external events and are charged with implementing whatever the House of Representatives and the Senate can sort of agree on saying should be done.
Sorry, that is the job description according to the US Constitution. The President can push and cajole and plead and bargain, but can't just spend arbitrarily or pass their own laws or programs. A US President is much more a COO than a CEO. A President is more a manager than an autocrat. That doesn't mean that some of them don't act like autocrats or even Kings (Andrew Jackson comes to mind). Both the best and worst Presidents appear to have been in office in the 1800s, no matter what Glen Beck says.
No, Barak Obama's presidency is really just about what the Pelosi-Reid Congress said to do. It takes a little over a year for the changes in congress to take effect. So, we will see the effects of the Bohner-Reid Congress by next summer. But, no President in the US ever has a really free hand. The press of course ignores this, and the majority of citizens don't even know it. After all, how many do you think have ever read the US Constitution? Of those, how many do you think understood it? If we take the comments here on Slashdot as typical for the population as a whole, the answers to both questions fall somewhere between very few and none.
However, for the purposes of the actual header for this fine but pointless debate, Barak Obama, definitely. He is running. On the other side, Mitt Romney, as the assumed future victor for the Republicans. The others all seem to be self destructing. Except Perry, who having already self destructing is now trying to destroy everyone else.
Perhaps Hermann Cain too. He sounds interesting. Maybe not credible, but interesting. Sort of like Joe Biden that way, though not wrong as often.
Any of the others who are declared would be nice.
Maybe even Sarah Palin (Yeah, I know she's not even running, but, Obama campaigned mostly against George Bush when HE (Bush) wasn'
No, read the Article. They used methane to grow the diamond films, sort of like the gaseous diffusion they use to grow semiconductor layers in Silicone.
That deposits the Carbon one atom at a time. It's not micro, Nano, Pico or even Exo. It's much smaller than that. We don't have prefix's for that level of smallness. It's Atomic.
I remember reading about this kind of thing in the mid 1990's. Scientific American reported on it. At the time, they were making diamond films on ceramic substrates. the diamond was grown by creating a carbon atom plasma and shooting it at the substrate. Shock plasma deposition of the carbon. It wasn't very efficient. They hadn't worked out too well how to mask and etch the films, so they were using electron beams tp cut into the diamond, then adding the dopant. That limited the size of the device produced. The device was around the diameter of a pencil eraser. The researchers (in Japan, if I remember correctly) were predicting commercial development in as little as five years. Well, I never saw anything come of it.
I was looking forward to that coming out too. I am an electrical engineer, and have worked for a long time with plans for building facilities and power lines and so forth. The device made in Japan was a single SCR (silicon controlled rectifier) that would work just fine at 600 Volts, and a little over 200 Amps. It operated at a temperature of a little over 600 degrees C, but still, an SCR can be used for many power applications. That single SCR was controlling a around 120KW. For big AC to DC power lines, we use SCR banks where each of the SCRs operate at about 24 Volts relative to the next SCR in the stack. This for stacks that go up to 750 KV. The stacks are paralleled to get the current that actually goes out over the line. One such line goes from Washing State to LA, and carries close to 10% of the total power used by LA. for what I was doing at the time. These diamond SCRs would have made a great speed control motor starter. At 480 VAC, we could have made the controller with six SCR's, three fuses, and a disconnect switch, plus a small PLC board. The control station would be bigger than the controller. Typical controllers for this type of application on say a 100 HP motor are around 7 feet tall, 4 to 10 feet wide and 3 to 6 feet deep. reducing this to 2 Feet wide, 3 feet high and 1 foot deep would free up a lot of space. This, if purchasable, would have given me a lot more freedom in placement. If I could reduce the size of the controller, the process people would have loved to use the extra space. I could have used that to justify spending up to $100,000.00 more for the device, in some cases.
We could really use such a device in industry. There are a ton of uses that I could think of off the top of my head. Used as an ultracapacitor controller, it would enable a single capacitor, the size of a couple of C cell batteries to store more power than a car battery. A large electronically controlled circuit breaker, with custom controls, and a quick action would also help to save a lot of equipment and lives.
There were a couple of real problems with it, though. First, it's flammable. The actual electronics would need to be isolated from any contact with oxygen. Encapsulation would do that. Real Graphene computer chips, which I would expect to see before this matures, would also be flammable. But, there are more options for protecting those, because of the relatively lower temperatures.
Also, the Diamond SCR's operated at temperatures higher than some common conductors can withstand, and well above the temperature at which Diamond burns. There would have to be special connectors, and cooling systems. That heat, even if from a small eraser sized element needs to go somewhere. Ultimately out into the environment.
Second, it's apparently not an easily commercialized process or material. I am seeing more reports of Diamond film growth, and also of graphene film growth and production. That is a good thing. Graphene seems to be moving towards fabrication faster than diamond. I would like to see both happening. I have also seen recently, that very low impedance conductors have recently been made from carbon nanotubes. While not room temperature superconductors, if they have lower conductivity than copper, I would really like to be able to specify them. Cost would be a factor there. Bu
"electricity is nearly useless for lifting spacecraft in all models except Heinlein's imaginary mass drivers."
Actually, it is really easy. The higher the acceleration, the shorter the distance required. The energy is easily supplied by solar power. Add a capacitor bank, and a much lower peak power is needed. Your figures are for peak load. If the launch is not a continuous operation, then average power is sufficient.
For a 100 KG payload, at 20 G, (200 M/S^2) that would take 12 Seconds (2380/200) to reach the velocity you quoted. That's at 20,000 Kg M/S^2, or roughly 20 Kilowatts. double it for inefficiencies, and you get a 40 KW power source needed to deliver a 100 KG payload to earth every 12 seconds. At 25% efficiency, in the 1 KW per square meter sunlight on the Moon, that's 160 square meters of solar cells to launch using "imaginary mass drivers" that are already installed on Navy ships. Granted, the barrels for this system would be long. (200 X 12^2/2 = 14,400 Meters), but if you increase the acceleration, you decrease the track length. The payload could withstand easily an acceleration of 10X that. People, not so much. It's long for a gun barrel, but not bad at all for a rail line. It's not like the thing has to be pointed straight up.
It would be a waste to ship fuel from Earth You are right there. But, that won't be done, except in very small loads in the first few years.
Rail guns are being developed right now that would do for shipping insensitive materials from the Moon to the Earth. They are being installed in Navy ships today. Power is just a question of finding available surface area and having a source of silicon or carbon to use in solar cell manufacture. The Moon has lots of silicon. You also need aluminum, Also very common on the Moon.
Surface area is not a problem either. Most of the Moon is unused. So is a lot of orbital space. As the Hitchhikers Guide says, "Space is really BIG!" Lasers and microwaves are being developed to move power from place to place, and are now to the stage that the Military is seriously considering satellite based power purchases. It's expensive, but they think it will be cheaper than the alternative. It currently costs more than $100.00 per gallon to get fuel to the front lines in Afghanistan. That makes generator power very costly.
But, I don't believe that Helium mining will ever be anything more than a byproduct of other minimg and manufacturing on the Moon. In that, I agree with you.
Gobi Desert. Already been done. It is called Mongolia.
For a similar desert scene, a little closer to home, you might want to consider Phoenix. Has the same extreme temperatures, the same arid conditions though winters are milder. Summer is hotter than in the Gobi. Phoenix is easy to find. Just go to the Grand Canyon, then head south until you get to a really big city.
A Moon base would need to have orbital farms to be really sustainable. Big rotating cans with windows would be all that's needed there. The two week day and night cycle on the Moon would be a real killer for plants. But, people could deal with it. Life there would be much like living in the Mall. Lots of Kids do that anyway. For a few months at a time it's OK. Probably wouldn't want to leave people on the Moon for long er than 6 months before roatating them to earth normal gravity anyway..We don't want their bones to soften.
That's why you ship a prototyping unit to the moon. Build everything else on site with local materials. It takes a bit longer, but it's orders of magnitude cheaper.
New York wasn't shipped intact from Europe, not even the majority of the materials were shipped from there. Only a little material that couldn't be made here at the time. The rest was of local manufacture. Why should a colony on the Moon be any different than a colony an ocean away?
Forget Helium 3. If you can build a mining operation on the Moon, you can ship anything back to Earth for little cost.
Build oxygen/aluminum-carbon rockets. Use them to launch payloads on an earth intercept orbit.
Build basic aeroshells with heat shields. Load anything you like into them. Have them land anywhere on Earth. Pick any lake, if they float, then no landing gear is needed. Tow the thing to a dock, and cut it up. Recycle the entire mass. Iron, aluminum, copper, silica, glass, rare earth elements, it's all gravy. If the asteroids are factored in, then you could ship oil back too. some asteroids are up to 40% oil. How many cubic kilometers do you want?
A couple of hundred people living in Space/on the Moon could pay for the entire space program. Using linear induction motors, you could launch from the Moon without even using rockets.
Remember, the astronomical cost of space is almost all used in getting there. The return trip is as easy as dropping a rock off a cliff. Once it's set up, the rest is easy. Setting it up is very hard (read astronomically expensive), the fist time. But only the first time.
My wife doesn't want more than a basic phone. she would like voice, text messaging, contact list, camera and nothing else. She is using an old Moto Razer right now, and it has too many features. A dumb brick phone would be her favorite real soon.
Meego? Nokia had Maemo working two years ago. It worked well, as anyone with an old N700 or N800 tablet could tell you. Just add a phone chip and the same software that the other phones have and there you are. But no, they couldn't go with a product that worked. Now, it all depends on Microsoft. If Microsoft fails like they have before, then Nokia is doomed. If Microsoft succeeds, then both Apple and Google/Android Foundation will up the ante. Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record at continual upgrading the software OS. So, I still come up with a net loser for Nokia.
Java/QT for developers would have been the way to go. Why didn't they just finish what they started? Corporate politics most likely. Now both the Symbian and the Linux sides lose. For a little while anyway.
HTML5, while limited, will run on every browser. It is being pitched as a platform for writing 'apps' for all of these devices. While the application sets are limited, they will work across all of the devices. Maybe we should all be brushing up on our Javascript skills.
Loosing QT for the phones is a problem, as it can be installed on all of the major platforms (unless Apple bans it), so Nokia clearly made a blunder there. I am sure though that if dropped by Nokia, the KDE folks will continue on with a QT fork. They may need a new name though. I'd suggest "graphical++". But I'm lousy with catchy names.
In China, they stock the paddies with fish when the rice is transplanted. They harvest the fish before the rice. Some of the methane you talk about is from the fish. Some is from bacteria. Bacteria are eaten by insects in the water, which are eaten by the fish, which are eaten by the people who also eat the rice. The fish also fertilize the fields. The bacteria and insects recycle human waste too. It's really an intricate system.
If you eliminate the rice, you lose the fish too. What are you going to replace that protein with? Cows or goats? they make even more methane. They would also need additional land for fodder.
They use the system they do because it provides the most nutrition for the least land.
Of course, you need lots of water to make it work.
A magnetic sail is possible, but to do what you propose would require an accelerating field. That would mean a lot of energy.
The proposed solutions I have seen involve either a superconducting magnet to create a miniature Van Allen belt around the craft, or a static generator to place a high positive charge on the spacecraft, usually with a negative charge on a wire from the craft to balance the charge. Protons and cosmic ray nuclei are repelled by the positive charge, as they also have a positive charge. How high the charge would need to be is a function of the energy of the incoming particles.
A magnetic field would cause the charged particles to bend, hopefully missing the spacecraft. Such magnetic lenses will have directions that offer more shielding than other directions. There would be close to no shielding from directly to the poles. But, it is much easier to shield a small hole than the entire craft.
There would also be a passive shield for reducing X-ray and UV rays. Gamma rays are much harder to shield against, but since most of those pass right through you, they are actually less of a threat. Most estimates I have seen say that the passive shielding would need to be around 18 inches of water (just less than half a meter). Though any material with a high percentage of hydrogen would work. Plastics are one possibility. Foam might work too. There has also been some work on exotic materials that provide a sort of quantum barrier to some forms of radiation.
The final design of an interplanetary craft will probably use all of these, as well as some that we don't know yet.
NASA has been quietly working on all this at a fairly low level for several decades now. They aren't done yet.
Some would, that would cool the remaining water down to freezing. further cooling by sublimation would cool it to the point where it would be stable in space, like the water in a comet.
Without knowing how you would build a nuclear powered rocket, there is no way to know how much radioactive fallout would be generated.
The NERVA system would have lost around a half pound of uranium mixed with 5% plutonium on a single launch. spread out over the hemisphere, it isn't really much. Since the Uranium is naturally occurring anyway, there is always some uranium dust in the air anyway.
The Orion system, on the other hand would have left several tons of plutonium in the atmosphere after each launch.
The HTGR versions I have seen proposed would have left several hundred pounds of uranium or plutonium in the air after each launch. None have actually been built and tested, so we don't know if it would really work. For these, the exhaust is much more toxic than just the radioactive component. YMMV.
Some of the proposed heat exchange engines might have left no residual heavy nuclei behind, but they haven't been built, so it's all still theory there.
BTW, in space, if you ever point your rocket away from the Earth, you are spraying the Earth with whatever you use for thrust.
You lose some water to evaporation, until the ice forms and blocks the hole. After that, you lose some to sublimation, until it passes the lower temperature limit for that process (around -60 degrees C.). The the losses stop. That's why comets can form and keep intact in the outer solar system.
To work well in a spacecraft, you would want to have a high reflectance outer surface. Letting the water freeze before any hole formed would also help limit water losses, but might hinder the stop leak effect.
Correct, or almost so. The NERVA rocket did produce thrust, but leaked . The leaks were due to erosion of the pipes at supersonic flow. The system worked by injecting a working fluid (liquid Hydrogen, liquid Helium, or liquid water.) into pipes (nozzles really) that ran through a working reactor. The reactor was designed to be very high temperature. The working fluid was heated to around 2000 degrees C before emerging from the rear of the engine. The system did work, but the thrust levels were not high enough to lift a working ship off the ground vertically. The plan at the time was to build an aircraft like vessel, and fly to high altitude, then keep going faster until you were in orbit. It might even have worked.
The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty killed it. The working engine put out small amounts of the radioactive fuel. The exhaust was radioactive, not because the water or hydrogen was radioactive, but because there were small amounts of heavy nuclei in the stream. The same problem in the Japanese reactor that the US press loves to pummel. The steam itself isn't radioactive, but it carries some radioactive dust. If the Test Ban Treaty had been worded differently, work could have continued on better nozzles. Oh well.
BTW, the unit looked cool on it's test bed. For all I know, it may still be there in Nevada. Of course, it had the nuclear fuel removed in the 1970's.
The "Crash of 2008" was the result of several simultaneous actions.
First, the overspending by the still relatively new Democratic Congress were not vetoed nearly enough by Mr. Bush.
Second, the real estate boom busted. Mr. Bush had warned of the coming collapse 4 years earlier, but Congress, both Republicans and Democrats were much too interested in claiming credit for the easy home loans to worry about something that was more than 3 months off.
Third, the relaxed accounting rules put in place during the Clinton Years had their final clash with reality. Reality won. Profits were nowhere near as high as investors were being told.
Fourth, the savings rate by Americans continued to decline, a trend that dated back to the Carter years, and is a result of tax policy. This resulted in under funded banks that relied mainly on loans to each other for collateral, as there were not enough depositors to provide the funds. Like paying one credit card with another, a point comes where you have to pay the piper. The long toll had gone on for years. Finally reaching a breaking point. Much of the banking system worldwide went down together. Full recovery still hasn't happened. Europe has several countries that are in deep financial trouble because of it. Several US States are hurting from this as well.
The US press of course blamed the President. That is after all a long time US tradition. Mr. Bush even got blamed for a hurricane or two. Stupid people believed it. New Orleans Mayor Levin for instance.
A coastal city that is 30 feet below sea level, with only a dirt levee between it and the ocean should expect storm flooding of epic proportions, say 30 feet or so. That is what happened. The Army Corps of Engineers had been warning of this since 1910. It happened. There was an interesting article in Scientific America about that in the late 1970's. It was not a question of if, only of when. The problem still isn't fixed, so it will happen again.
Now of course, Mr. Bush is no longer President, and Mr. Obama is getting blamed for the actions of others, including the weather. Well, he asked for the job. The blame comes with the territory.
So, it's all officially Obama's fault now. Really, it is lots of people's fault. Who benefited? Mr. Soros, and a few select others. Mr Buffet didn't do too badly either. Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Reid got a lot from it too. Mrs Pelosi has lost her throne as an aftereffect, but Mr. Reid managed to hang on, thanks to a hundred Million from Mr. Soros. The list goes on, but it is so much easier to just blame someone. It doesn't fix anything, but you might feel better for a while. That is really the take home lesson. We didn't fix anything, but we have blamed someone. They may or may not have had something to do with it.
Don't worry about Mr. Soros, he got 7 Billion of the Stimulus funds to develop an oil field in Brazil where the oil is contracted to go to China. Mr. Buffet made out well on the recent stock climb, so he's doing well too.
There are lots of interesting happenings on the other side of this political aisle too. Pick any famous Washington or Wall Street insider, and they are probably in it up to their necks. Some don;t even know they were partially at fault. After all, some very intelligent people are deliberately stupid. It's pride.
No matter what side you are on, you were probably betrayed. It is after all about money.
It's been tried, was stopped by telco lawsuits. Just like Sarah Palin was forced out of Alaska government by media lawsuits against Alaska filed by east coast liberals.
Bet you never see that reported on MSNBC, CNN or Huffingtonsocialist post. PBS, maybe in 40 years or so. Like they will finally talk about the NYT/CBS charactor assignation of Barry Goldwater in 1964, but still won't talk about Joe McCarthy in 1956/7.
Truth is, college kids, more of your life is controlled by Monopolist oligarchs than you know, and the real controllers are people you have been taught to trust.
That's how Social Security has worked from day 1 (in 1934). The Feds have always spent the excess. They still do. There is still an excess, and one is expected for around 5 more years. What happens after that is the rub.
Yes, it always was a Ponzi scheme. I expected in the 1970's that it would be bankrupt before I retired. That still looks about right.
But for your modest proposal, do you really want to starve your parents to death? If so, you are one seriously deranged individual. I am sure they have a free room and board situation for you in Leavenworth Kansas. Enjoy!
This corresponds nicely with the cold weather onslaught in the 1300's. the Little Ice Age that killed off the Vikings in Greenland and opened the conditions for the Black Plague in Europe and Arabia.
Maybe we should be worried about high and low CO2 levels.
I was up by the ATK plant last month. My Aunt died. She had lived within sight of the Morton Thiokol plant on the Utah-Idaho border for almost 30 years. Her Husband retired from it. ATK has displays set up out front of some of the solid fuel rockets they make. Most are military medium or short range types. The shuttle boosters are featured too.
What if they could have a successful orbital insertion by March? The have the Contract, they can get paid for any work done. If they do, they might be able to get the full contract value. It would be a nice touch. NASA even has a history of canceling replacement programs for the Shuttle, just before they work.
That would be sweet! maybe ATK could compete with SpaceX.
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I like the Hamster wheel idea. It might just work with fewer environmental negatives than the others have. Hamster can get by on yard waste. How well do Hamsters scale?
If it turns out that it isn't a good idea, we can always feed the hamsters to dogs and then eat the dogs like the Chinese do.
This 'DeRegulation you so fear and hate is not what you think it is.
The Government didn't stop regulating. They haven't done that in the Financial markets since 1912. The Government didn't stop regulating the Mining industry. They haven't done that since the early 1920's. The Government didn't stop regulating telecoms or any of the other monopolies.
What they did was to let the fox guard the henhouse. The Fed is after all a private company run by a few large banks. It should be no surprise that they act to support those same large banks. The fed is in fact overseen by people from the same large banks.
Much the same is true of the Stock Markets and the equities exchanges. Who are the Regulators? Bernie Madoff was one once. Doesn't that give you a nice warm feeling? He was watching out for you. Just like Ken Lay once did.
The same is true for most monopolies. When Microsoft was convicted of antitrust violation under Bush (the trial was started under Clinton), Microsoft was allowed to write the settlement they wanted. Before you start to go and Bushbash, remember that six years earlier, the same thing happened under Clinton. Both sides are equally at fault.
Who regulates the railroads? Railroad executives who are on temporary loan to the Government. Who regulates the Medical field? The Doctors Union (AMA) supplies people to the Federal Government.
The problem isn't that there is no regulation, or that it has been somehow disabled. The problem is in how it is being implemented. Sorry, but we have had that problem all the way back to the Grant Administration in 1868.
The Stock Market was regulated when it crashed in 1929. It just wasn't regulated well. The Banks were regulated in 1930 when so many failed, they just weren't regulated well. The Electrical Energy Markets weren't unregulated when the Enron manipulation caused the collapse of the energy availability market in 2001, it just wasn't regulated well. The Housing Mortgage Market wasn't unregulated when it collapsed in 2009, it just wasn't regulated well.
Some of these were the result of action by the regulated organizations, some were the result of large players who knew what the results would be, and some were the results of acts of Congress. Some were "D. All of the above."
Do you see a pattern here? Perhaps we should consider having someone other than industry insiders or Congressional profit takers doing the regulating?
And so it goes. The Fox really is the Hen house guard. And no one is held responsible.
I think you have Ron Paul confused with Barak Obama. They have different views.
Ron Paul is the one who thinks that half of the government should be abolished. No, not the defense department, though he would like to pare it down to the size that Eisenhower wanted, basically just the sargents and officers (Who will spend most peacetime playing insipid games while the sargents really run the Army like they always do), with a small core of soldiers for the officers to command for the Army, and keep the Navy, though about a third of the ships could be just placed in storage. Air Force about half way between Army and Navy. Marines, they are part of the Navy.
No, it's the rest of the government he would like to be rid of, The IRS, the Welfare, Education and such like departments. Anything that doesn't pay for itself. He believes that around half of what the Federal Government does is unconstitutional. That half is what he really wants to eliminate. He would have no trouble achieving or surpassing President Obama's goal of eliminating 1.4 Trillion Dollars from the Federal Governments budget. He would probably eliminate twice that.
If any of that is wise is another question entirely. So also is the question of if he could actually DO any of it.
Barak Obama on the other hand wants to expand entitlements (Money the Government promises to give people and corporations). He is the candidate that believes that when you are in debt, the way to get out of debt is to spend more money. After all, -1-1=2 right? To be honest, he probably learned this sort of math in the Senate. That is how Senators seem to think. It doesn't appear to matter which Party they officially belong to.
Also, to continue to be honest, Barak Obama like George Bush (2) before him has most of his problems stemming from action outside the US, or from acts of Congress. Like Bush, he is more a victim of the Pelosi-Reid congress than anything else. Presidents get blamed for everything, and they appear to have a great deal of power, but reality is that they mostly respond to external events and are charged with implementing whatever the House of Representatives and the Senate can sort of agree on saying should be done.
Sorry, that is the job description according to the US Constitution. The President can push and cajole and plead and bargain, but can't just spend arbitrarily or pass their own laws or programs. A US President is much more a COO than a CEO. A President is more a manager than an autocrat. That doesn't mean that some of them don't act like autocrats or even Kings (Andrew Jackson comes to mind). Both the best and worst Presidents appear to have been in office in the 1800s, no matter what Glen Beck says.
No, Barak Obama's presidency is really just about what the Pelosi-Reid Congress said to do. It takes a little over a year for the changes in congress to take effect. So, we will see the effects of the Bohner-Reid Congress by next summer. But, no President in the US ever has a really free hand. The press of course ignores this, and the majority of citizens don't even know it. After all, how many do you think have ever read the US Constitution? Of those, how many do you think understood it? If we take the comments here on Slashdot as typical for the population as a whole, the answers to both questions fall somewhere between very few and none.
However, for the purposes of the actual header for this fine but pointless debate, Barak Obama, definitely. He is running. On the other side, Mitt Romney, as the assumed future victor for the Republicans. The others all seem to be self destructing. Except Perry, who having already self destructing is now trying to destroy everyone else.
Perhaps Hermann Cain too. He sounds interesting. Maybe not credible, but interesting. Sort of like Joe Biden that way, though not wrong as often.
Any of the others who are declared would be nice.
Maybe even Sarah Palin (Yeah, I know she's not even running, but, Obama campaigned mostly against George Bush when HE (Bush) wasn'
What I'd really like to know is when can we get something like this secure phone at Verizon?
Of course, then we would need a secure Market..
No, read the Article. They used methane to grow the diamond films, sort of like the gaseous diffusion they use to grow semiconductor layers in Silicone.
That deposits the Carbon one atom at a time. It's not micro, Nano, Pico or even Exo. It's much smaller than that. We don't have prefix's for that level of smallness. It's Atomic.
I remember reading about this kind of thing in the mid 1990's. Scientific American reported on it. At the time, they were making diamond films on ceramic substrates. the diamond was grown by creating a carbon atom plasma and shooting it at the substrate. Shock plasma deposition of the carbon. It wasn't very efficient. They hadn't worked out too well how to mask and etch the films, so they were using electron beams tp cut into the diamond, then adding the dopant. That limited the size of the device produced. The device was around the diameter of a pencil eraser. The researchers (in Japan, if I remember correctly) were predicting commercial development in as little as five years. Well, I never saw anything come of it.
I was looking forward to that coming out too. I am an electrical engineer, and have worked for a long time with plans for building facilities and power lines and so forth. The device made in Japan was a single SCR (silicon controlled rectifier) that would work just fine at 600 Volts, and a little over 200 Amps. It operated at a temperature of a little over 600 degrees C, but still, an SCR can be used for many power applications. That single SCR was controlling a around 120KW. For big AC to DC power lines, we use SCR banks where each of the SCRs operate at about 24 Volts relative to the next SCR in the stack. This for stacks that go up to 750 KV. The stacks are paralleled to get the current that actually goes out over the line. One such line goes from Washing State to LA, and carries close to 10% of the total power used by LA. for what I was doing at the time. These diamond SCRs would have made a great speed control motor starter. At 480 VAC, we could have made the controller with six SCR's, three fuses, and a disconnect switch, plus a small PLC board. The control station would be bigger than the controller. Typical controllers for this type of application on say a 100 HP motor are around 7 feet tall, 4 to 10 feet wide and 3 to 6 feet deep. reducing this to 2 Feet wide, 3 feet high and 1 foot deep would free up a lot of space. This, if purchasable, would have given me a lot more freedom in placement. If I could reduce the size of the controller, the process people would have loved to use the extra space. I could have used that to justify spending up to $100,000.00 more for the device, in some cases.
We could really use such a device in industry. There are a ton of uses that I could think of off the top of my head. Used as an ultracapacitor controller, it would enable a single capacitor, the size of a couple of C cell batteries to store more power than a car battery. A large electronically controlled circuit breaker, with custom controls, and a quick action would also help to save a lot of equipment and lives.
There were a couple of real problems with it, though. First, it's flammable. The actual electronics would need to be isolated from any contact with oxygen. Encapsulation would do that. Real Graphene computer chips, which I would expect to see before this matures, would also be flammable. But, there are more options for protecting those, because of the relatively lower temperatures.
Also, the Diamond SCR's operated at temperatures higher than some common conductors can withstand, and well above the temperature at which Diamond burns. There would have to be special connectors, and cooling systems. That heat, even if from a small eraser sized element needs to go somewhere. Ultimately out into the environment.
Second, it's apparently not an easily commercialized process or material. I am seeing more reports of Diamond film growth, and also of graphene film growth and production. That is a good thing. Graphene seems to be moving towards fabrication faster than diamond. I would like to see both happening. I have also seen recently, that very low impedance conductors have recently been made from carbon nanotubes. While not room temperature superconductors, if they have lower conductivity than copper, I would really like to be able to specify them. Cost would be a factor there. Bu
He is also the only Geologist to ever walk on the Moon.
"electricity is nearly useless for lifting spacecraft in all models except Heinlein's imaginary mass drivers."
Actually, it is really easy. The higher the acceleration, the shorter the distance required. The energy is easily supplied by solar power. Add a capacitor bank, and a much lower peak power is needed. Your figures are for peak load. If the launch is not a continuous operation, then average power is sufficient.
For a 100 KG payload, at 20 G, (200 M/S^2) that would take 12 Seconds (2380/200) to reach the velocity you quoted. That's at 20,000 Kg M/S^2, or roughly 20 Kilowatts. double it for inefficiencies, and you get a 40 KW power source needed to deliver a 100 KG payload to earth every 12 seconds. At 25% efficiency, in the 1 KW per square meter sunlight on the Moon, that's 160 square meters of solar cells to launch using "imaginary mass drivers" that are already installed on Navy ships. Granted, the barrels for this system would be long. (200 X 12^2 /2 = 14,400 Meters), but if you increase the acceleration, you decrease the track length. The payload could withstand easily an acceleration of 10X that. People, not so much. It's long for a gun barrel, but not bad at all for a rail line. It's not like the thing has to be pointed straight up.
It would be a waste to ship fuel from Earth You are right there. But, that won't be done, except in very small loads in the first few years.
Rail guns are being developed right now that would do for shipping insensitive materials from the Moon to the Earth. They are being installed in Navy ships today. Power is just a question of finding available surface area and having a source of silicon or carbon to use in solar cell manufacture. The Moon has lots of silicon. You also need aluminum, Also very common on the Moon.
Surface area is not a problem either. Most of the Moon is unused. So is a lot of orbital space. As the Hitchhikers Guide says, "Space is really BIG!" Lasers and microwaves are being developed to move power from place to place, and are now to the stage that the Military is seriously considering satellite based power purchases. It's expensive, but they think it will be cheaper than the alternative. It currently costs more than $100.00 per gallon to get fuel to the front lines in Afghanistan. That makes generator power very costly.
But, I don't believe that Helium mining will ever be anything more than a byproduct of other minimg and manufacturing on the Moon. In that, I agree with you.
Gobi Desert. Already been done. It is called Mongolia.
For a similar desert scene, a little closer to home, you might want to consider Phoenix. Has the same extreme temperatures, the same arid conditions though winters are milder. Summer is hotter than in the Gobi. Phoenix is easy to find. Just go to the Grand Canyon, then head south until you get to a really big city.
A Moon base would need to have orbital farms to be really sustainable. Big rotating cans with windows would be all that's needed there. The two week day and night cycle on the Moon would be a real killer for plants. But, people could deal with it. Life there would be much like living in the Mall. Lots of Kids do that anyway. For a few months at a time it's OK. Probably wouldn't want to leave people on the Moon for long er than 6 months before roatating them to earth normal gravity anyway..We don't want their bones to soften.
That's why you ship a prototyping unit to the moon. Build everything else on site with local materials. It takes a bit longer, but it's orders of magnitude cheaper.
New York wasn't shipped intact from Europe, not even the majority of the materials were shipped from there. Only a little material that couldn't be made here at the time. The rest was of local manufacture. Why should a colony on the Moon be any different than a colony an ocean away?
Forget Helium 3. If you can build a mining operation on the Moon, you can ship anything back to Earth for little cost.
Build oxygen/aluminum-carbon rockets. Use them to launch payloads on an earth intercept orbit.
Build basic aeroshells with heat shields. Load anything you like into them. Have them land anywhere on Earth. Pick any lake, if they float, then no landing gear is needed. Tow the thing to a dock, and cut it up. Recycle the entire mass. Iron, aluminum, copper, silica, glass, rare earth elements, it's all gravy. If the asteroids are factored in, then you could ship oil back too. some asteroids are up to 40% oil. How many cubic kilometers do you want?
A couple of hundred people living in Space/on the Moon could pay for the entire space program. Using linear induction motors, you could launch from the Moon without even using rockets.
Remember, the astronomical cost of space is almost all used in getting there. The return trip is as easy as dropping a rock off a cliff. Once it's set up, the rest is easy. Setting it up is very hard (read astronomically expensive), the fist time. But only the first time.
My wife doesn't want more than a basic phone. she would like voice, text messaging, contact list, camera and nothing else. She is using an old Moto Razer right now, and it has too many features. A dumb brick phone would be her favorite real soon.
Meego? Nokia had Maemo working two years ago. It worked well, as anyone with an old N700 or N800 tablet could tell you. Just add a phone chip and the same software that the other phones have and there you are. But no, they couldn't go with a product that worked. Now, it all depends on Microsoft. If Microsoft fails like they have before, then Nokia is doomed. If Microsoft succeeds, then both Apple and Google/Android Foundation will up the ante. Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record at continual upgrading the software OS. So, I still come up with a net loser for Nokia.
Java/QT for developers would have been the way to go. Why didn't they just finish what they started? Corporate politics most likely. Now both the Symbian and the Linux sides lose. For a little while anyway.
HTML5, while limited, will run on every browser. It is being pitched as a platform for writing 'apps' for all of these devices. While the application sets are limited, they will work across all of the devices. Maybe we should all be brushing up on our Javascript skills.
Loosing QT for the phones is a problem, as it can be installed on all of the major platforms (unless Apple bans it), so Nokia clearly made a blunder there. I am sure though that if dropped by Nokia, the KDE folks will continue on with a QT fork. They may need a new name though. I'd suggest "graphical++". But I'm lousy with catchy names.
In China, they stock the paddies with fish when the rice is transplanted. They harvest the fish before the rice. Some of the methane you talk about is from the fish. Some is from bacteria. Bacteria are eaten by insects in the water, which are eaten by the fish, which are eaten by the people who also eat the rice. The fish also fertilize the fields. The bacteria and insects recycle human waste too. It's really an intricate system.
If you eliminate the rice, you lose the fish too. What are you going to replace that protein with? Cows or goats? they make even more methane. They would also need additional land for fodder.
They use the system they do because it provides the most nutrition for the least land.
Of course, you need lots of water to make it work.
A magnetic sail is possible, but to do what you propose would require an accelerating field. That would mean a lot of energy.
The proposed solutions I have seen involve either a superconducting magnet to create a miniature Van Allen belt around the craft, or a static generator to place a high positive charge on the spacecraft, usually with a negative charge on a wire from the craft to balance the charge. Protons and cosmic ray nuclei are repelled by the positive charge, as they also have a positive charge. How high the charge would need to be is a function of the energy of the incoming particles.
A magnetic field would cause the charged particles to bend, hopefully missing the spacecraft. Such magnetic lenses will have directions that offer more shielding than other directions. There would be close to no shielding from directly to the poles. But, it is much easier to shield a small hole than the entire craft.
There would also be a passive shield for reducing X-ray and UV rays. Gamma rays are much harder to shield against, but since most of those pass right through you, they are actually less of a threat. Most estimates I have seen say that the passive shielding would need to be around 18 inches of water (just less than half a meter). Though any material with a high percentage of hydrogen would work. Plastics are one possibility. Foam might work too. There has also been some work on exotic materials that provide a sort of quantum barrier to some forms of radiation.
The final design of an interplanetary craft will probably use all of these, as well as some that we don't know yet.
NASA has been quietly working on all this at a fairly low level for several decades now. They aren't done yet.
Some would, that would cool the remaining water down to freezing. further cooling by sublimation would cool it to the point where it would be stable in space, like the water in a comet.
Without knowing how you would build a nuclear powered rocket, there is no way to know how much radioactive fallout would be generated.
The NERVA system would have lost around a half pound of uranium mixed with 5% plutonium on a single launch. spread out over the hemisphere, it isn't really much. Since the Uranium is naturally occurring anyway, there is always some uranium dust in the air anyway.
The Orion system, on the other hand would have left several tons of plutonium in the atmosphere after each launch.
The HTGR versions I have seen proposed would have left several hundred pounds of uranium or plutonium in the air after each launch. None have actually been built and tested, so we don't know if it would really work. For these, the exhaust is much more toxic than just the radioactive component. YMMV.
Some of the proposed heat exchange engines might have left no residual heavy nuclei behind, but they haven't been built, so it's all still theory there.
BTW, in space, if you ever point your rocket away from the Earth, you are spraying the Earth with whatever you use for thrust.
Just something to think about.
Actually, it does both, at the same time!
You lose some water to evaporation, until the ice forms and blocks the hole. After that, you lose some to sublimation, until it passes the lower temperature limit for that process (around -60 degrees C.). The the losses stop. That's why comets can form and keep intact in the outer solar system.
To work well in a spacecraft, you would want to have a high reflectance outer surface. Letting the water freeze before any hole formed would also help limit water losses, but might hinder the stop leak effect.
Correct, or almost so. The NERVA rocket did produce thrust, but leaked . The leaks were due to erosion of the pipes at supersonic flow. The system worked by injecting a working fluid (liquid Hydrogen, liquid Helium, or liquid water.) into pipes (nozzles really) that ran through a working reactor. The reactor was designed to be very high temperature. The working fluid was heated to around 2000 degrees C before emerging from the rear of the engine. The system did work, but the thrust levels were not high enough to lift a working ship off the ground vertically. The plan at the time was to build an aircraft like vessel, and fly to high altitude, then keep going faster until you were in orbit. It might even have worked.
The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty killed it. The working engine put out small amounts of the radioactive fuel. The exhaust was radioactive, not because the water or hydrogen was radioactive, but because there were small amounts of heavy nuclei in the stream. The same problem in the Japanese reactor that the US press loves to pummel. The steam itself isn't radioactive, but it carries some radioactive dust. If the Test Ban Treaty had been worded differently, work could have continued on better nozzles. Oh well.
BTW, the unit looked cool on it's test bed. For all I know, it may still be there in Nevada. Of course, it had the nuclear fuel removed in the 1970's.
The "Crash of 2008" was the result of several simultaneous actions.
First, the overspending by the still relatively new Democratic Congress were not vetoed nearly enough by Mr. Bush.
Second, the real estate boom busted. Mr. Bush had warned of the coming collapse 4 years earlier, but Congress, both Republicans and Democrats were much too interested in claiming credit for the easy home loans to worry about something that was more than 3 months off.
Third, the relaxed accounting rules put in place during the Clinton Years had their final clash with reality. Reality won. Profits were nowhere near as high as investors were being told.
Fourth, the savings rate by Americans continued to decline, a trend that dated back to the Carter years, and is a result of tax policy. This resulted in under funded banks that relied mainly on loans to each other for collateral, as there were not enough depositors to provide the funds. Like paying one credit card with another, a point comes where you have to pay the piper. The long toll had gone on for years. Finally reaching a breaking point. Much of the banking system worldwide went down together. Full recovery still hasn't happened. Europe has several countries that are in deep financial trouble because of it. Several US States are hurting from this as well.
The US press of course blamed the President. That is after all a long time US tradition. Mr. Bush even got blamed for a hurricane or two. Stupid people believed it. New Orleans Mayor Levin for instance.
A coastal city that is 30 feet below sea level, with only a dirt levee between it and the ocean should expect storm flooding of epic proportions, say 30 feet or so. That is what happened. The Army Corps of Engineers had been warning of this since 1910. It happened. There was an interesting article in Scientific America about that in the late 1970's. It was not a question of if, only of when. The problem still isn't fixed, so it will happen again.
Now of course, Mr. Bush is no longer President, and Mr. Obama is getting blamed for the actions of others, including the weather. Well, he asked for the job. The blame comes with the territory.
So, it's all officially Obama's fault now. Really, it is lots of people's fault. Who benefited? Mr. Soros, and a few select others. Mr Buffet didn't do too badly either. Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Reid got a lot from it too. Mrs Pelosi has lost her throne as an aftereffect, but Mr. Reid managed to hang on, thanks to a hundred Million from Mr. Soros. The list goes on, but it is so much easier to just blame someone. It doesn't fix anything, but you might feel better for a while. That is really the take home lesson. We didn't fix anything, but we have blamed someone. They may or may not have had something to do with it.
Don't worry about Mr. Soros, he got 7 Billion of the Stimulus funds to develop an oil field in Brazil where the oil is contracted to go to China. Mr. Buffet made out well on the recent stock climb, so he's doing well too.
There are lots of interesting happenings on the other side of this political aisle too. Pick any famous Washington or Wall Street insider, and they are probably in it up to their necks. Some don;t even know they were partially at fault. After all, some very intelligent people are deliberately stupid. It's pride.
No matter what side you are on, you were probably betrayed. It is after all about money.
It's been tried, was stopped by telco lawsuits. Just like Sarah Palin was forced out of Alaska government by media lawsuits against Alaska filed by east coast liberals.
Bet you never see that reported on MSNBC, CNN or Huffingtonsocialist post. PBS, maybe in 40 years or so. Like they will finally talk about the NYT/CBS charactor assignation of Barry Goldwater in 1964, but still won't talk about Joe McCarthy in 1956/7.
Truth is, college kids, more of your life is controlled by Monopolist oligarchs than you know, and the real controllers are people you have been taught to trust.
That's how Social Security has worked from day 1 (in 1934). The Feds have always spent the excess. They still do. There is still an excess, and one is expected for around 5 more years. What happens after that is the rub.
Yes, it always was a Ponzi scheme. I expected in the 1970's that it would be bankrupt before I retired. That still looks about right.
But for your modest proposal, do you really want to starve your parents to death? If so, you are one seriously deranged individual. I am sure they have a free room and board situation for you in Leavenworth Kansas. Enjoy!
This corresponds nicely with the cold weather onslaught in the 1300's. the Little Ice Age that killed off the Vikings in Greenland and opened the conditions for the Black Plague in Europe and Arabia.
Maybe we should be worried about high and low CO2 levels.
I was up by the ATK plant last month. My Aunt died. She had lived within sight of the Morton Thiokol plant on the Utah-Idaho border for almost 30 years. Her Husband retired from it. ATK has displays set up out front of some of the solid fuel rockets they make. Most are military medium or short range types. The shuttle boosters are featured too.
What if they could have a successful orbital insertion by March? The have the Contract, they can get paid for any work done. If they do, they might be able to get the full contract value. It would be a nice touch. NASA even has a history of canceling replacement programs for the Shuttle, just before they work.
That would be sweet! maybe ATK could compete with SpaceX.