Nonsense... In my previous job, I worked with several excellent Engineering types from NASA. Aside from the backroom guys who build the equipment that flies, the Astronauts themselves are very much Engineers. Mario Runco, for example, was responsible for the design and testing of the large window that exists on the Destiny lab.

Problem is that if you bring that quantity back to earth, you'll depress the prices to the point where it isn't worth going out to get them. Even with a 10 fold reduction in launch costs, such as what SpaceX gives us, there aren't any elements or materials in existence and of sufficient value to mine in space and return to earth. The only possible exception is Helium-3, but that assumes we can develop He3 fusion any time soon.

Even if you were to find an asteroid made from pure platinum, by the time you bring sufficient quantities home to pay for your mission you'll have depressed the platinum prices to the point where it wasn't worth going to get it in the first place.

No, GPS does takes General Relativity and Special Relativity into account, and confirms both nicely. Due to the motion of the spacecraft in orbit with respect to us on the ground, one would expect the GPS satellites to lose about 7 microseconds a day. However, because the satellites are further out of our gravity well, General Relativity predicts the satellites will gain about 45 microseconds a day. Basically, this means that if GR and SR were not taken into account, the GPS system would be useless after about 2 minutes.

Source: http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html

However, the effect of Frame Dragging is many orders of magnitude smaller, to the point where it will not have a measurable effect on GPS. To even have a hope of measuring it, Gravity Probe B had gyroscopes made from a set of the most perfect spheres ever manufactured. If you were to scale these spheres up to the size of the earth, the tallest mountain would be less than 1 meter tall.

The real problem (not necessarily this situation, due to the federal regulations involved) is when your IT organization is run by a bunch of incompetent baboons. Our IT guy is appropriately paranoid, except that he's completely lost if you drop him in front of a command line. His attitude is that if the software didn't come from Redmond, and didn't cost some obscene amount of money, it must be evil!

In the end, the customer support team wound up going behind his back and setting up an RT server off-site to handle our trouble ticketing, and also to run the NMS we use to monitor the customer systems we're responsible for. After this had been successful for a few months, we finally got a slice of the DMZ to use as our personal playground, on condition that we ftp (shudder) a nightly copy of the database to him.

You're forgetting that washing mirrors, especially ones that are low to the ground like this, is unskilled labour and therefore cheap. It doesn't take a university education to sling a bucket and a squeegee. Hell, just go and grab a bunch of the people that are hanging out at interesections harrasing motorists to wash ther windows.

Maintaining a nuclear plant, on the other hand, takes an incredible amount of education and training. Nuclear technicians do not come cheap. Pulling numbers out of my ass, I would wager you could probably hire 5 to 10 mirror washers for every nuclear tech.

That's when the weight of the paperwork associated with the rocket matches the weight of the fully fueled rocket itself.

In all seriousness though, the concept of "man rating" a rocket is a bit of a red herring. There's no real difference between a rocket used to launch humans vs one used to launch other payloads to orbit. Humans just happen to be a bit of a squishy, wet payload. The only real caveat is that we tend to limit the g-forces for human spaceflight to 3 to 4gs, while equiment launches can handle more.

I vote for whomever will defeat Harper and his cronies. ABC. Anything But Conservative.

Well, if an MP wants to stay a member of a political party and get elected in the next election, they'll toe the party line. If they vote against their party, except when explicitly permitted to do so, they tend to get kicked out of caucus immediately, and lose all the rights and privileges that gives them.

Better than Harper and his cronies. It's time we kicked him to the curb.

Hey now.. this isn't Mythbusters.

Also has the benifit of being easy to completely destroy. Until recently, one of the common ways of distributing cryptographic keys was encoded on nitrated (flash) paper. Once the key was read into the encryption device, the user would ignite the paper, causing it to almost assuredly burn up completely, destroying any trace of the data on it. By the same token, if your position was compromised it was very quick to destroy and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

Company I work for builds portable satcoms sytems. I can pull up in my VW Jetta, pull the cases holding the terminal out of my trunk, and get you 4mbps of connectivity inside of 10 minutes, from anywhere. As a bonus, if I was powering it off of the inverter, I'd get about 72 hours of run-time.

I'm an amateur radio operator myself, but to claim it's useful for Emcom in the modern era is laughable. It's a great hobby, lots of really fascinating experimentation now that we're getting computer litterate amateurs out there. (WSPR, WJST, Olivia, other digital modes come to mind).

Eh, I thought that's what the Sea King helicopters were. Most countries drop torpedoes for anti-submarine warfare... we just cut to the chase and drop the whole damned helicopter.

When it comes to satellite, you have to realize how horrendously expensive satellite capacity is. Please realize that it costs between $350,000,000 and $500,000,000 to launch a communications satellite, and they last at most 15 years before their thruster fuel runs out and solar panels degrade. Further, you've probably got a 10% to 15% chance that your $500,000,000 will literally go up in smoke when the rocket explodes on launch. The other fact is basic supply and demand. There are only about 25 to 30 locations where the satellites can be parked to service North America, and each satellite has a limited capacity. This is a natural limit, and there's pretty much nothing that can be done if you want continental coverage.

I work in this business, and my rule of thumb is that raw satellite data capacity costs approximately $6/kbps/month on a two year contract. Thus, enough capacity to run 1mbps over a satellite will cost you about $6000/month. If you're out in the boondocks of the high arctic running oil exploration, and need to get your data down to the south immediately, this is cost effective. if you're trying to run an internet service provider, you have to oversell it hugely in order for your average person to be able to afford it.

Not always. Our power utility (BC Hydro) has been strongly pushing power conservation here. This has gone so far as the power utility offering to give small municipalities/cities LED traffic lights at no cost. (The agreement is that the municipalities pay the utility the same price as they were paying on the old incandescent units for a period of 5 years, then the rates drop).

This is for two reasons:

1) It's cheaper than building a new power plant
2) They can sell the electrical power we don't use to California/Washington/Oregon at much higher prices. This type of arbitrage is where Hydro makes most of its profit. Turn off the hydro plants at night to save water, and buy dirt cheap nuclear power from California. Run the hydro plants flat out during the day, and sell the power to California at inflated prices.