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Comment Re:Space is the Place (Score 1) 692

Honest question. Is this even theoretically possible with chemical rockets?

Lets say you're using Saturn V's to lift people, and you only need 300lbs of payload to LEO (seems unrealistically low, but in this scheme I assume you'll be mining some asteroids somewhere for the interplanatary ships and fuel). Each Saturn V can lift ~850 people. Sounds pretty good. Except that at current rates, 250 people are born every minute globally. Granted, that number would probably slow given universal longevity. If it drops to 40% the current rate, you would need to Launch a Saturn V sized rocket more than once every 10 minutes. That seems extremely implausible, even from a pad maintence perspective. If you had 1000 launch sites around the world, you'd still need to light off more than 1 rocket per day at each of them to keep up.

Ok, so you use something better than a Saturn V, and maybe you can lift 1600 people. Numbers still don't work. Ok, so you take drastic measures to cut the birth rate by another 50%. You're still lighting off dozens of huge rockets every day for the foreseable future.

TL;DR; If you want to evacuate the planet, you need to invest in a non-rocket launch system of some kind. And even then the numbers are going to be challenging.

Comment Re:Out of curiosity (Score 2) 321

No ads designed to mislead. If you are a download page and you have dozens of "Click here for your download" ads you are getting adblocked or simply not visited. If you care so little about your website that you can't be bothered to protect it's users from malicious and misleading ads, you don't get my ad views.

Comment Re:One Criterion Missing (Score 4, Insightful) 416

"Prove" is a dangerous word. Everyone involved in the testing of this device is someone who wants desperately to see it succeed. When the effects you're measuring on on the order of 50 microNewtons, it doesn't take much of anything to screw up the results. Read about the history of N-Rays for a historical example of how even (or maybe especially) very intelligent, informed people can fool themselves into believing poor experimental results.

Three experiments does not overturn 300 years of experimental evidence in support of conservation of momentum. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far the evidence has been interesting, but not extraordinary. Like the article says, show me an experiment with thrust correlating with power input. Show me another one where the device runs for a month. But most importantly, show me one performed by skeptics!

Comment Re:Gamechanger (Score 4, Interesting) 514

$0.50. That's how much savings one full charge/discharge can save you at current rates. That's $182 per year. Even people that plan ahead balk at a 5 year payoff, so you'd have to have the cost for a 10kWh battery be under $1000 to get people to buy in. Even $2k seems unlikely at technology and market levels.

Obviously those numbers change if the peak/off peak ratio changes, but $0.05 isn't enough of a difference to make it practical for that usage. Of course, it also functions as backup power or quite possibly can be used to increase the effective efficiency of renewables. I'm not trying to say that the system isn't impractical, just not economically sound for the on/off peak power shifting.

Comment Re:Why even have a class ? (Score 4, Insightful) 355

This is actually quite the opposite. I find it hard to believe that there wasn't a single person in the back of class just trying to get their work done and get out. Not everyone swears in their day to day life, let alone at authority figures. Not everyone cheats. Not everyone lies.

Comment Re:Hard to take sides (Score 5, Insightful) 355

He is certainly incompetent. Any idiot could see that the university wouldn't let a blanket fail stick, you can't fail an entire class based on group behavior that's just not the way academics works. If everyone in the class was really that bad, he should have been documenting specific incidents and then failed them individually at the end of the semester.

Comment Re:SpaceShipTwo (Score 1) 447

It wouldn't be 24/7, it would be the last 30 minutes. Or the last hour. You could even rig things so that if weight on wheels is set and the engine is shutdown normally it would be immediately wiped. Whatever. It's not about pilots playing grabass everyday. It's about pilots playing grabass and crashing a 737.

Comment Re: And what good would it do? (Score 1) 447

What percentage of max thrust is it set at? You have to guess with video. The data recorder will tell you exactly.

What happens when the data recorder shows you that alarms X, Y started sounding at 3 minutes before impact and Z at 1 minute, but the crew only reacts to alarms X and Z. Why didn't they verbally acknowledge Y? Did they not just not have time? Did they never see it? What if Z was the real cause of the accident and X and Y were relatively minor faults? There's plenty to be gained in terms of cockpit design and pilot training by seeing how the flight crew handles an impending catastrophic accident.

Comment Re:And what good would it do? (Score 1) 447

This accident isn't the right test case. The right test case is an accident where there are a dozen alarms sounding the cockpit and handling them correctly could have saved lives. Knowing how the crew reacts and responds to those alarms, where their attention is and how they work together could all be key to improving the design of cockpit systems or training programs.

Comment Re:Sure, great, new comms channel (Score 1) 123

Well, by most reports the target computers of Stuxnet were airgapped. There are ways, usually through social engineering.

Drop a particularly neat looking, high capacity (and extremely exploited) flash drive in the parking lot and wait for someone to pick it up. At worst they'll plug it into their open PC looking to see if they can find the owner. At worst they'll put it on their lanyard and start using it day to day, infecting every PC they plug it into. Yeah, airgapped PCs should have their USB disabled, but there are many places that should know better that don't bother. And that's just off the top of my head, a team of 20 brainstorming for a week is going to come up with ideas.

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