That's what cracks me up about these kinds of stories. Of all the books to ban, the one that will get aspiring bomb makers to blow themselves up is not the one. Amazon carries much better books on the subject. Some were published by the US government, ironically.

She's not even the worst one in the California congressional delegation. Not by a long shot.

But only in small quantities. Not enough to affect the bottom line. In the early airships they would simply vent hydrogen if they needed lower buoyancy, so they took on hydrogen along with fuel and ballast when arriving at the destination. You don't need to do that with helium. Or rather, you don't design a helium airship such that it's necessary.

The biggest drawback to helium is it gets contaminated by other molecules moving the other direction. Not really sure why that happens. Anyway, that's why Zeppelins undergo periodic maintenance in which the helium has to be pumped out and purified.

I knew they would get serious when people started stealing money from the government by filing false tax returns. The USG won't bestir itself for hackers stealing military secrets, but if you affect the flow of tax dollars you're in trouble.

Might be, depending on how close the missile was. Getting sprayed with fragments (assuming the people aren't killed) isn't that devastating for an airship. They just go right through. The thing that might destroy an airship is a blast rips a giant hole in the envelop.

Slashdot has notoriously always had a comically unfunny April 1st, and at this point I have to think the complete lameness of it all is the real meta-joke.

Correct:

Alois Böcker in the L-33 was the first to arrive over the capital. He dropped most of his bomb-load on the East End, around Bow and Stratford, with the airship crew reporting visible fires and explosions with each bomb burst . However, a shell from the defenses over Bromley exploded inside the ship, causing tremendous physical damage but no fires. She dropped much of her water ballast, reported by the ground spotters as a smoke screen, and made her way eastward, losing 800 feet of altitude each minute. After a dangerous encounter with a British airplane which pumped several drums of Brock-Pomeroy ammunition into L-33 to no effect, the airship came to earth at Essex, where Böcker and his men jumped to the ground and fired several flares into her. They were promptly captured as L-33 burned to the ground, mostly intact.

Hydrogen only burns in the presence of oxygen (for our purposes, anyway). That's also why British aircraft had so much trouble setting airships alight with incendiary rounds - the rounds would pass straight through without ever getting the right H2/air mixture for ignition. Incendiary rounds performed so badly the Brits thought the Germans were putting a layer of some inert gas just inside the airship skin.

It wasn't until they switched to a mix of explosive and incendiary bullets that they began to have success. The explosive rounds would tear big holes in fabric and allow hydrogen and oxygen to mix. It still took a couple drums to get the ship burning, though.

There was a Zeppelin in WW I that survive the explosion of a AA shell inside the ship. And that was filled with hydrogen. The crew was able to land it safely in the UK and had to destroy it with a flare gun. Those things are a lot more durable than you'd think, since the sheer volume of the lifting gas means you've got to tear the thing apart to make it fall out of the sky.

The reason they say it would survive a missile strike is most anti-aircraft missiles have very small warheads. An AMRAAM, for example, has either a 40 or 50 pound warhead, which is going to do less damage than an artillery shell. They only bring down airplanes because 1) airplanes are full of flammable fuel and 2) tiny changes to the shape of an airplane make it disastrously unflyable.

In practice airships are quite practical using helium. It's not that expensive, and you don't consume it as part of normal operations. A modern design will only vent lifting gas in an extreme emergency.

When I rode the Zeppelin NT they told us it can safely fly under the same condition helicopters are safe, though they did say they wouldn't carry passengers once the winds started to get gusty since it tends to make people sick.

The airship cost $300,000 to buy. It doesn't matter if it cost someone else $90,000,000 to build it; the loss of $89,700,000 is the government's loss, not the current owners.

Well, the company bought it back from the government for $300k. That doesn't mean customers can buy it for $300k. Based on what other players in the market are charging if this company doesn't go bankrupt first the airship will probably sell for a whole lot more than that.

It's different if we're dealing with a place that can (and by its very definition and the general idea behind it should) be frequented by visitors and other strangers you have no direct connection to, i.e. a business. What do you think would happen if someone made a "White only" restaurant? Or how about "Muslim only"? Think that would sit well?

I'd be perfectly okay with it. I think the right to choose with whom you associate should trump group rights.

The explosions at Fukushima are pretty well understood to be a result of hydrogen buildup in the enclosures. So what? Those explosions resulted in a handful of deaths, which isn't even a really bad day as far as industrial accidents go. The Bhopal disaster killed between 5000 and 8000 people. Are you against pesticides as a result?

Do you have any evidence to back up this suspicion, or is it just casual slander?

Well, the problem is not in the current reactor designs. Those are as good as it gets.

I'm not sure how you can make a statement like this. Are you saying there's no room for improvement?

I would like to hear more about thorium reactors. But India is working on those and here in the USA there is a tremendous NIH problem.

I see no evidence this is true. The reason we don't get newer designs in the US is purely regulatory - it would cost billions to certify a new reactor technology, so companies find it cheaper to just build another copy of the last one that got through the regulatory process.