On your comment about "assuming I ever put anything truthful on Facebook..."

Yes, if anyone asks for stuff that isn't their business, give them misinformation. If there's a lot of misinformation out there about you, it'll make it harder for an identity thief to have an accurate file.

What the Government should do is create a whole SLEW of false identities, make them "available", watch them, trace who is trying to use them, and arrest and prosecute them. If a good fraction of identities that people are able to snarf out there are these honey pots, we'll soon cut down severely on that crime.

--PM

It's quite possible someone could 'react' to sensitive questions just out of fear. There's a lot at stake.

False positives, not so good--trash a probably innocent person. I think FMRI has a chance of determining truthfulness, but polygraphs, not so much.

--PM

It's not impossible, I've been doing it for about 5 months and I've lost 22lbs. I actually have been eating about 2000kcal/day but exercising for about 500, for a net calorie of 1500kcal/day.

I weighed 181lbs and now weigh 158.4 lbs, I'm five feet 8 inches tall.

I can tell you I can more or less comfortably eat less than 1800 kcal/day at the cost of being sort of hungry, not VERY hungry. I assure you it's quite doable. I like the exercise though because it lets me eat more.

All you have to do is not eat junky food, eat more of the less calorie dense foods like fruits and vegetables, and have other things to do in life other than eat--these make managing hunger on less than 2000 calories/day really, really doable. It also helps to track EVERYTHING you eat.

I would call it "moderately hard" not "pretty impossible", and it gets easier when you're talking about 2200 instead of 1800kcal/day.

--PM

would only cost the US Government $1.25 trillion.

So you're right, less than the idiotic wars and it would stimulate the economy, and I find it more palatable than enriching the super-rich some more.

--PM

It seems to me that the next thing to really boost computer performance is optical interconnect.

With optical interconnect, parasitic capacitance and RC delays are just gone, and associated power consumption radically reduced.

I know that there are various parties working on optical interconnect and even optical transistor equivalents.

I don't mean to imply that achieving optical interconnect (or optical transistor equivalents) will be easy, I'm just saying that it has promise to remove many of the current performance limits.

--PM

Well, if you XOR with a good random one-time pad, I don't think that anyone can break your encryption ever, not even with a quantum computer.

The ROT13 is just unnecessary fluff.

--PM

The Democrats haven't threatened to default on the Government debt and trash the US's credit and blow up the world economy in order to repeal a bill they don't have the votes to repeal--all while illegitametly holding a majority in the House due to the fact that they gerrymandered districts.

The Republicans got less votes in the last House elections but have the majority SOLELY because they abused their power in past years to re-draw districts lines (gerrymandering) to their benefit.

Essentially, the Republicans want to impose their will via any means at all, fair or foul.

Not that I approve of the Democrats, I think we need to turn over ALL of Congress, but I also recognize that there are levels of bad and the Republicans have demonstrated their complete unfitness to govern.

--PM

Using viruses as weapons against bacteria seems like an awesome idea, however, wouldn't a person's own immune system start attacking its ally the phage?

I mean, parts of the immune system, all they do is react to antigens, and phages would be seen as just another invader that doesn't belong, regardless of the fact that it is attacking a common enemy.

For this reason I'm not sure phage therapy would necessarily work.

--PM

Hello,

    I think you're pretty much stuck with copper for your device due to the thermal load you're going to put on it, though this is just a guess. Your 2 minute+ rest between pulses may spare you that necessity, but I don't have a good feel for the thermal issues unfortunately. The key calculation to do is figure out if the RF and electron bombardment heat load melts anything or creates so much thermal stress that something breaks during your pulse.

    Frankly, I don't think your financial resource is adequate for designing a new tube, not at all, because after you designed it you'd then have to build it, and I think that'd cost you $30k minimum just to build the tube, forget about the power supplies, cathodes, etc. I think your best bet is to salvage a tube from a decomissioning accelerator and use that.

    Since your application smacks of communications, are you sure you can make do with an oscillator? Or were you planning to pulse it on and off like Morse code?

    Also, I do NOT think you can count on fixing a tube when you melt it. These tubes operate under vacuum and tearing it down and putting in new parts is going to be both slow and expensive, and you don't seem like you have the cash.

    We haven't previously spoken of the Russians, which is a mistake on my part. The Russians like to say they've done everything in vacuum tubes before the rest of the world thinks of it, and they're not entirely lying. They might well have a used tube sitting around somewhere that might SORT OF meet your requirement.

    I think in the end though, no matter what you do, you're going to have to compromise on your requirements a bit to get something affordable on your budget, either that or 10x your budget.

    There was some RF stuff being done in Brazil a long time ago, i think it was academic work, maybe you could talk to them and get a cheap piece of used equipment.....

    As for me, I guess "physicist" is pretty close.

Good luck with your project!

--PM

Those are pretty steep requirements, and yeah, I don't know of anything off the shelf that meets your requirement, doesn't mean there isn't something though.

Your 5uS pulse of >20GW alternative is well beyond anyone's state of the art. How much money you got anyway?

Also, why won't L3 sell you anything? They don't have what you need, but they have close:

So you pretty much need 175kW average power in X-band. Maybe you could pick one of the higher power of the X-band magnetrons here:
http://www2.l-3com.com/edd/magnetrons_vsm.htm
or here
http://www2.l-3com.com/edd/magnetrons_cm.htm
and modify it with heroic cooling to raise the duty cycle from .001 to something which works?

Or is the moderate amount of noise you get from magnetrons too much for you?

And actually I just peeked at L3's klystrons, how about the bottom one on this list?
http://www2.l-3com.com/edd/magnetrons_vsm.htm

Again, you'd have to cool it quite a bit to get your average power, and could you live with higher peak power and less pulse length?

As for gyrotrons, CPI has built a CW gyotron at 95GHz that can do 100kW. It seems like they have some gyotrons that are pretty close to your 3rd alternate requirement, or won't they sell to you either?
http://www.cpii.com/product.cfm/1/18/30

What're you building anyway? (I mean, what's your application for the microwaves?)

Oh? What're your requirements exactly?
There are several US companies/gov't labs/universities/foreign companies that can do this.
To name a few:
1) Radio Science
2) L3 (communications?)
3) CPI (communications and power industries, i think)
(on to labs.)
4) Navy Research Lab
5) Air Force Research Lab
6) Possibly some DOE labs have people who could (Sandia, Los Alamos, not sure about Livermore)
6a) Stanford Linear Accelerator lab (SLAC)
(on to universities)
7) MIT
8) University of Michigan
9) University of Maryland
10) University of New Mexico
(the Universities seem to have access to Russian talent that came here)
10a) University of Californa, Davis
on to foreign countries:
11) E2V in Britain
12) Probably some places in Germany and France (Heard of ITER? gyrotrons form the core of the strategy for heating that fusion plasma, these are at 130 to 170GHz I think)
13) The Chinese are doing a LOT, both gov't and universities
14) The Japanese are doing gyrotrons too for ITER

ANYWAY, any of the above could do the job better than your unemployed particle physicists because they have designed tubes already.

Best of luck,

--PeterM

The labor markets are saturated, and wealth is concentrating on the top. There just isn't a market for lots of labor anymore, manufacturing is increasingly automated, services like retail is becoming more automated (thanks Amazon!), so why not soak the rich and use the money to support more research instead of letting all that capital idle at the top?

Because that's EXACTLY what is happening now. All that capital is idling at the top, the middle/lower classes are underpaid and underemployed and not generating demand.

How about we fund a "research class" instead of a "leisure class"?

--PM

MJ has been shown to have legitimate medical uses. It doesn't belong on Schedule 1.

If it's off Schedule 1 then research to use it SAFELY as a drug can proceed far more easily, and maybe we can use it for things like neuropathic pain and appetite recovery during chemotherapy WITHOUT the potential brain-damaging side effects.

I've got a friend who has neuropathic pain and none of the legal drugs work for him. And he can't use MJ because he's subject to drug testing.

Take MJ off Schedule 1 and maybe he can stop living with pain 24/7!

--PM

Can you IMAGINE how horrible the Windows source base must be?

Sorry, if I'm going to commit to an open source OS project, it'll never be Windows. I'd work with Linux or one of the BSDs.

MS can release Windows as FOSS all they want, I'll never adopt it.

--PM

I'd support limted use of DDT for bedbug control, however, using DDT is probably futile.

Like all pesticides, the bugs they're used against become resistant to them.

Google it yourself or check out:

http://www.panna.org/blog/DDT-for-bedbugs

Best,

--PM