Does Virgin Galactic even have plans for a vehicle capable of LEO insertion? All that SpaceShipOne/Two nonsense barely even qualifies as reaching space, and achieves about a 50th the energy necessary for actual orbit.

I think there's something more interesting going on here than simple population control...

The article itself hardly touches on the technical merits of the missile system. It mentions how there are hardly any public releases of technical aspect to discuss, and that the handful of images of the system in operation show intercept angles that are highly unlikely to be successful. The core argument of the article is that the whole situation is nothing more than a PR campaign on both sides.

Hamas fires inaccurate artillery rockets, unlikely to actually hit anything, at Israel, under the hopes Israel counter-attacks and causes lots of collateral damage that looks bad to international press.

Israel produces a defense system and makes precision counter-attacks to prove their technological and military prowess, and restraint in its use, to international press.

It looked like the SB card performed well within the 20-20K range, and unless you're looking to do further processing on the analog output from the card, anything more than that is unnecessary.

Because they don't scale up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square-cube_law

Smaller rotors means lower mass flow rate, requiring higher flow velocity to produce the necessary thrust. Higher flow velocity means higher power requirements. The larger your aircraft, the more difficult it becomes to produce the necessary amount of power to remain airborne.

More importantly, a pair of counter-rotating rotors gets around the pesky roll issue caused by rotor stall on the retreating side at high speed. The rotor may still stall, but it doesn't matter nearly as much since you're still balanced.

You're going the complete wrong direction. If you want to have any change in hell of actually having enough power to get this thing in the air, you need to get your blade loading down, and that means a huge rotor. Huge rotors mean you need to be running low RPMs to keep it subsonic at the tip, and remember that the colder and higher molecular weight atmosphere means the speed of sound is going to be ~30% lower.

The quadrotor design paradigm exists because small electric motors are cheap, and the power-to-weight ratios available in the couple pound range are absurd to the point that good engineering is unnecessary. In the couple thousand pound range, power becomes far more scarce, and the small, inefficient rotors just won't cut it. They have lowered the minimum barrier to entry for hobbyists, and research projects that need a simple airborne platform. They don't work well for full scale aircraft.

Yes. It does. That's why a Li-Ion battery is permanently dead if you allow it to self-discharge too far.

Since you don't seem to be getting bored of yourself, it's the fundamental principle of thermionic emission.

Zero. In a multi-cell Li-Ion battery, once your cell voltage drops below a certain critical value, a protection circuit disconnects it from the rest of the pack. A fully discharged battery will simply be a short circuit bypassing all the individual cells.

Catastrophic failures can happen. There's no way to predict all eventualities, and trying to do so will bankrupt you. All you can do is provide enough redundancy to bring your statistical failure rate to an acceptable level.

Flight 232 was simply a poor design. The three hydraulic systems all had lines that ran right next to each other, and had no shut off valves. When the tail engine had an uncontained failure, it severed lines on all three systems, which then depressurized throughout the aircraft.

The previous poster was referring to dead batteries.

You can still perform NAT over IPv6, or set up a more intelligent proxy if your data stream carries information that could unmask the remote endpoint. There will be no difference.

That doesn't make any sense. A dead Li-Ion battery has little remaining energy, and that which does exist can't go anywhere because the built-in safety mechanisms would have burned out all the internal fuses.

And I'm sure it communicates with a number of microcontrollers to perform the real-time IO, rather than crippling the CPU with those tasks, and doesn't carry a giant completely unused GPU around with it that uses far more power than the CPU.