PaulS1950

The klinkers are ground and used for abrasive blasting when rapid removal of material is desired and the finish is of little importance. It is available in different grit sizes but is one of the most abrasive compounds used widely.

The fact that you feel weightless or at least partially so when the elevator goes down and feel heavier when the elevator goes up proves at least one part of the theory. The experiments that have been made with orbital clocks have proven that time slows for the matter that travels faster. The atomic bomb proved that E=MC^2 and fusion proves that M=E/C^2. The theory of reletivity is more factual than your bank account balance.

You have to ask yourself whether time is one, two or three dimensional. Then you have to solve for how many time lines can be running in divergent paths Then you have to accept the consequences.

The molecules in metals move around (against each other) more when heat is added. Not all conductors lose conductivity when heated - carbon decreases its resistance as it gets warmer.

Capita, Do you have a license to use the type of engine you are planning? Here in the USA you need a license, a permit for the launch and inspection of the rocket and engine. Only A, B and C solid propellent engines can be used without a permit and license. Any of the higher impules engines need at least a launch permit and to use a re-fuelable motor or make your own you need to be licensed or you can go to jail for making /using explosives as defined by the BATF. Part of the inspection is a recovery system so you are going to have to deal with that in some way.

What would happen if you take the heat in the air and pump it into the earth? The ground would warm making more heated air... Doesn't sound like a good idea does it. How about just cooling the buildings by using the earth as a sink to begin with? Take the warm air, pipe it through an uderground "radiator" where the heat is transfered to the cool earth at four meters deep and then into the building at 55F - 65F degrees. Since we are cooling a smaller space and only part time then the Earth would have time to get rid of the heat it absorbed and during the winter you could use the same system to warm the colder outside temperature to the same 55F - 65F to assist in heating those same buildings further protecting the Earth from becaming "heat soaked".

You can get nitrates from urine - Potasium nitrate is what was made and used for centuries (and more) to make black powder.

Easier and less expensive to transport yes but not easier to mine. There is no way currently to mine robotically and manned missions to mine an asteroid present many more problems than a Lunar or Martian base. Being between Mars and Jupiter most of the asteroids would take longer to get to and from. There is little hope of getting water from an asteroid so a manned mission would need to take everything that was needed for life with you for the entire trip and stay on station (likely 3 years) with no hope of getting help if needed in a timely manner. It takes us 7 months to get to Mars. Add the time it will take to get to the asteroid belt and it makes a supply mission impractical and a resue mission impossible. The distance from the sun makes solar power production limited too which is not a problem on the Moon. Transportation of materials from an asteroid is easier but we have to invent the mining technology that can be anchored to a spinning, tumbling asteroid that has very little gravity. The drilling would have to be managed so as not to adversely affect the rotations and orbit of the rock that is being mined. Collisions could be expected and acounted for in advance of the mission. We also need to transport the mining gear all the way there and either be able to use it on multiple asteroids or the cost would be prohibitive. There has to be a method in place to safely transport the material back to Earth without the threat of uncontrolled reentry which means multiple return vessels for each asteroid mined. If only one vessel were used it would have to carry very large amounts of materials and would be very expensive to transport to the asteroid in the first place. I may be wrong but it seems an impractical or at least less practical than mining on the Moon to assist in developing technology to move on.

Buttacup, I watched an address by Obama at NASA not long ago in which he stated that funding for NASA would be doubled but only if the moon and mars were put on the back burner. Apparently Obama wants NASA to concentrate on exploring and possibly mining asteroids. He has no concept of the fact that the asteroids are farther away than Mars and the limitations on what robotics can do. I doubt that we will get closer to a Lunar or Martian facility in the near future unless we stop the interference from the political machine.

As I understand the technology fusors require a lot more power than they have any hope of producing. That can be considered a good thing because they don't have any appropriate shielding for the radiations produced by fusion reactions. If you want to spend money to make some power you can get more power from solar or wind or even low tempurature geo-thermal units. If you are building it for the "status", well, that is hard to match with anything that really works.

Baking soda will foam when exposed to battery acid - they don't .

Back when I first entered the mechanics field we used grease - the same grease we used to pack bearings with to seall the battery posts. we just cleaned them shiny and coated them with grease and then installed the terminal and clamped it tight. That worked well but the grease eventually hardened and lost its seal.

no matter how hard you try you can never use the power generated by a machine to power it. The losses in the system make it impossible. Alternators are at best 90% efficient. Electric motors are at best 90% efficient. All wires and circuitry have resistance. All semiconductors have voltage drops when conducting. A simple circuit consisting of a battery connected with a wire with a diode will lose .3 to .5 volts through the diode. If we are talking about a 1.5 volt battery that is 20 to 30% loss. On your "self powered" turbine (lets take one arm of it) you have a large center fan that moves the arm and around it you have 8 turbines that produce power to run that center fan. Disregarding the fact that if they are 1/2 the diameter of the center fan the air will only affect them at 1/4 of the power of the central fan, you have eight turbines that have 10% losses each trying to drive the fan that has 10% losses (power in to power out) within it not allowing for any electronic controls and takes much more power to drive it. You won't have enough power to turn the fan fast enough to keep the smaller fans working. Instead of producing power you will have a brake that slows the system faster than if it had no fans at all. Think of it this way: If I built a four wheel cart with an electric motor on one wheel and an alternator at each of the other three wheels would it power itself? If I added a battery to get it up to some optimal speed then disconnected the battery would it continue to travel at its optimum speed? The answer is that it would slow faster than if you just disconnected the alternators and coasted because the drag on the alternators would slow the cart faster than without them. Even so they can never make enough power to keep up with the motors demands.

Ninus Maximus, if the truck were sitting on the ground without the sphere would your opinion be different? The sphere is a counter "wheel" of the truck - the tires of the truck drive the sphere in the same way that the motor drives the tires. All of the reactions come from the magnetic interactions within the electric motor that is supplied with power from a battery. It is all a number of action/reactions that end at the friction of the gravity working on the sphere allowing movement through the motor to the gears to the tires to the sphere. An inertial drive must be able to move even when it is in micro gravity and a vacuum. Your toy truck could be made to move its tires and they could be made to move the shere but it would not have linear travel without the weighted contact with a surface to supply friction. I may not completely grasp what an inertial engine is but I know enough about mechanics to know that you are just using a final reduction of speed by running wheels inside a sphere. The tires are just friction gears to the final wheel which is the sphere.

I would start with the basics - PH tests, specific gravity and then see if I could find a collaborator who would run a spectragraph to compare the chemical make up of the two liquids. The problem I foresee is how to determine which bottles have been tampered with - some may be genuine.

No, but if you look in the bottom of the can it has an oil in it. I have cans of those protectors that I have had for twenty years... still good!

I wonder how well a Sterling engine would work using the sun for heat during the day with the ground as a sink and using the ground as a heat source and the cool night air at night. It wouldn't make much electricity or pump much water but it should be faily reliable.

What happened to the three laws of robotics? Isn't there a rule against giving artificial intelligence arms and legs? Providing a learning intelligence with the means to injure or eliminate its slower and less intelligent creator is absurd to me. A learning machine could easily find a logical reason to erraticate the chaos that it sees in its makers. That would overcome any "prime directive" against harming a human. Part of the learning process is challenging the status quo. We all go through that in our teen years. What happens when all the AI (who are connected through the internet) go through this at the same time? Am I wrong to be concerned at the direction that AI is predicted to take? I also find the idea of implanted intelligence (computers in our brains) a good way to control the masses - even moreso than is done through the media today. Once the implant is installed who decides what "upgrades" it accepts? I don't see this as a problem that will occur in my life time but in my children's or grandchildren's lifetime it is more probable than simply possible. I like technology - it is easy to turn off! In the future who controls the switch?

Most websites have a link that mutes the sound. Click that and you are good to go.

As much as I would like to have the disks I have to decline because they are licensed to you for personal use on a single computer. It would violate copyright law, as far as I know, and I cannot do that. I do thank you for the thought but must decline. Paul

The felt rings are impregnated with an oily corrosion inhibitor. It helps to seal the posts to the case. That is why they last for years and never foam up as they would if they were impregnated with baking soda (Sodium Bicarbonate).

Thank you, I will check them out as I get the time.

The problem with DOSBox is that windows still doesn't allow printing from a dos program that used direct commands to the printer and the printer doesn't have a DOS driver. What I am left with is a dedicated DOS machine if I want full use of my old software.

Well, wrong guess! I wrote three programs using C and C++ over twenty years ago and with my last computer upgrade I lost all ability to use them. (windoze 7) I would like to run these programs until I get them re-written for windoze and then I may continue to use the DOS computer in my reloading room just to keep the nostalgia of the old software. I am also contemplating the use of linux on another machine - it seems a good idea to have more than one OS and more than one computer. I have thought for a long time that a linux or unix OS would be a new challenge to learn. Maybe I can use C or C++ to build cross platform software and have my programs on all of them. At 60 years old I am still trying to challenge myself - and trying not to get into any trouble. I did find a couple of GNU/Linux, Ubuntu and Trisquel but I don't know if they will work on an old pentium machine. I have downloaded Freedos and a few others along with some added utilities and useful bits that may allow the use of network, USB, and my DVD drives. I have one computer that ran milenium and another that is running with win98. They are pretty useless for anything other than putting a new OS on and learning how the OS's work with different uses. I hate to junk them and they are too old to "recycle" without being torn up and discarded so I want to see what I can do with them. I do like command line OSs - they allow the user to make decisions that now are made by the OS. I don't know what I am in for with Linux - I looked at Ubuntu and it has a graphical user interface and doesn't seem to have a command line interface - a bit discouraging so far..... Can anyone help with something that will operate on an older CPU (Pentium) and has a command line OS? (GNU/linux) I believe I can select a version of DOS that will work.

Does Linux have a dos kernal that supports software direct printer access? I like the idea of Linux but I have never used it before. I have used DOS and although it was riddled with external attacks and internal problems I learned to use it well. Can a 60 year old Dos nut learn to use Linux well? Where would I get all the stuff needed to start out? (remember I will be using a pentium machine with an intel chipset) Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedI found Ubuntu and downloaded it as a first step into Linux. I am wondering if this is a good choice...?