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Comment: Re:Update on this story (Score 1) 377

by qazsedcft (#36260710) Attached to: DOJ Could Ban Texas Flights Over Anti-Patdown Law

Dear Lover of 1984-Style Government (aka, a liberal):

I'm always amazed how distorted the political name-calling has gotten. White means black and black means white. From http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/liberal:

liberal
Etymology
From Old French liberal < Latin liberalis ("befitting a freeman") < liber ("free").

1. (now rare except in phrases) Pertaining to those arts and sciences whose study was considered "worthy of a free man" (as opposed to servile, mechanical); worthy, befitting a gentleman.

2. Generous, bountiful.

3. Generous in quantity, abundant.

4. (obsolete) Unrestrained, licentious.

5. Free from prejudice or narrow-mindedness; open-minded, open to new ideas, willing to depart from established opinions, conventions etc.; permissive.

6. (politics) Open to political or social changes and reforms in favour of increased freedom or democracy.

Comment: Re:Plane (Score 1) 97

by qazsedcft (#34833780) Attached to: NASA's Kepler Spots Its First Rocky Exoplanet
Yes, but we also know exactly what's the probability of detecting a planet in our plane of sight. The point of the Kepler mission is to examine hundreds of thousands of stars and determine which ones have planets and what kind of planets they are. Then using probability we can then extrapolate how many such planets exist around other stars (not in our plane of sight). The sample size is what makes this extrapolation valid.

Comment: Re:Serious question here ... (Score 1) 351

by qazsedcft (#33963988) Attached to: NASA Reveals Hundred Year Starship Program
But all rockets work that way: you accelerate until all of the fuel is used up. Ion engines are not special in any way, they just take longer to use the fuel. However, that has no effect on the final result. Conceptually, it's really easy to understand. All reaction engines (including conventional rockets and ion engines) work by "throwing" some mass. The momentum of the lost mass provides thrust in the other direction. Since the thrust is the result of the change in momentum it depends only on two things: the mass which is lost and the velocity at which it is "thrown".

Comment: Re:Serious question here ... (Score 1) 351

by qazsedcft (#33961270) Attached to: NASA Reveals Hundred Year Starship Program
Ion engines don't have this constant velocity problem.

I don't know what you're talking about. If you have an unimpeded path through vacuum you're going to have a constant velocity.

Any self-propulsion system has exactly the same problems due to the limits imposed by the rocket equation. Basically, an ion engine can reach a higher velocity only because its exhaust velocity is much higher, but it's still far from practical for interstellar travel. For that you need to get your rocket to about 0.1c, which is practical only if your exhaust velocity is at least something like 2% of c or 6,000,000 m/s. The exhaust velocity of ion engines is only about 30,000 m/s.

Comment: Re:Serious question here ... (Score 1) 351

by qazsedcft (#33960912) Attached to: NASA Reveals Hundred Year Starship Program
To go where? "Out of the solar system" is pretty vague. At over 113 AU from the Sun, the Voyager 1 probe could be considered outside the solar system right now, but that's not a terribly interesting place if you ask me. Now if we're talking another star then that's about 268,000 AU - quite a different scale.

Comment: Re:Thats cheating (Score 1) 246

by qazsedcft (#32146760) Attached to: 1 Molecule Computes Thousands of Times Faster Than a PC

(Otherwise, somewhere 'outside' the observable universe, there is an infinite amount of storage available for each number needed, and some sort of mechanism that handles those calculations in what looks like finite time to any point of view inside the universe - congratulations, you've just proved both the omnipresence and the omnipotence of God - probably not what you were aiming to do).

Dude, I want some of that shit you're smoking!

QOTD: "Overweight is when you step on your dog's tail and it dies."