swansont

Your limitation is going to be supplying energy to the laser. If you want to melt through steel, which is going to take about .5 J/gK, and that will require getting it to about 1300-1500 ºC, so that's maybe 700J/g and you want to melt through tens of grams, so maybe 20kJ of absorbed energy is required. If the reflectivity is 50% and laser efficiency is 50%, you need to supply a minimum of 80kJ of energy. You could do that with a 1 kg battery. The discharge rate so you can melt the steel quickly will be the limitation, since I've ignored any heat losses from the target, and that rapidly becomes a bad assumption.

It was in my links a few posts back. Add to that that standard deduction and personal exemption, and you have to have at least $200k in income to end up in that tax bracket. And even then your tax actually goes down, because the 28% ceiling went up and there's $20k of income that used to be in the 33% bracket. I think that's the reason why some are reporting the $210k (or $250k) number as the cutoff for seeing a tax increase.

An individual photon does not have a density. You can talk about the density of an ensemble of photons; that would be a number density.

No, that's not how it works — the 33% tax bracket becomes 36%, and that's the threshold that moves up from ~$171k to ~$190k, so the 28% bracket has a much higher ceiling. The 35% tax bracket increases to 39.6%, but it starts at just under $375k, according to your link.

It's applicable to any cross product in a right-handed coordinate system. It works for force because F = IL x B

The air has a pressure of 10^5 Pa (14.7 PSI). Normally this has no effect on motion, because the pressure is the same all around. Any liquid that escapes must create a void in the container, unless that volume is replaced by the air, meaning there is now an upward force on the liquid. The air is powerful because there is a column of it kilometers high, all under the influence of gravity, available to push on the container.

Yes, precisely. They don't spend all of it. Whereas the government will spend all of it. If I had to guess, it's because of the tax brackets that are already in the tax code. But the line has to be drawn somewhere; if it was $250k or $300k, we'd be having the same discussion. In the context of taxes, though, it's not a sharp divide, because of marginal tax rates — income under the divide aren't touched. The additional tax is $3-4 for each hundred dollars of income above that level. edit: Thinking about this further, I think that it's a misnomer. "Rich" is a statement about wealth more than income. A $200k income doesn't make you rich, because you can spend it all and have nothing left if you do so foolishly. But it gives you options that a lower income lacks, and though there are always going to be exceptions, it is generally far easier to become rich. IOW, if you have such an income for a period of time, and do not become rich, it's probably due to your lifestyle choices, i.e. not sufficiently differentiating between "want" and "need" in choosing your standard of living.

I'm guessing it's the numbers about savings rates of the rich quoted very early in the thread. I have no trouble discussing Joe and Jane Smith. If Joe and Jane's AGI (salary), less deductions, is $300k (meaning they actually made more than $315k), their increased tax burden is about $2000. And Joe and Jane had this same top marginal tax rate a decade ago, but paid more under Clinton, because the rates on their income below $250k haven't been changed from the decrease under Bush. http://taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org/blog/_archives/2009/5/12/4182953.html http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Tax-VOX/2010/0923/Obama-tax-plan-Who-gets-hit If Sam and Sally can somehow live on $50k a year, why can't Joe and Jane? I personally haven't wondered why Obama gets labeled a socialist for a long while. It's the same reason the inheritance tax gets called the death tax, why there was discussion of "death panels" and why torture became "enhanced interrogation techniques." Republicans love socialism when it helps them — corporate subsidies for corn, ethanol, oil, etc.; placing the burden of environmental cleanup on the government whenever possible. The liked socialized medicine when it got them votes and helps industry (medicare prescription drug). And there's TARP. Obama gets labeled as a socialist pre-emptively so people won't notice how socialist the right is.

The standard Crookes radiometer you can buy on the cheap (it's not in a vacuum) works on heating rather than radiation pressure — the vanes move the opposite way for the two effects.

Short answer: Electrons don't orbit. That's a classical view, and the QM reality is different. You could test this by trying to accelerate different isobars (same mass number) with different electron configurations and seeing what happens. I have to think that if it were true, someone would have noticed by now.

Hydrogen bombs use tritium. I don't know what the efficiency is, but the much larger cross section means that it will be a lot bigger than p-p reactions.

The cross-section for proton-proton fusion is exceedingly small. In the sun, the reaction rate means the average proton fuses roughly once every billion years. (It has to be slow, or else the sun would have burned out long ago) http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/energy/ppchain.html A billion years is 3 x 10^16 seconds, so the reaction rate (under those conditions) is the inverse of that. If you had a mole of hydrogen gas in the tank, and the bomb reaction was similar to the conditions of the sun and took a microsecond, you might expect to have ~100 p-p fusion reactions. So it would mostly combust.

! Moderator Note The call stands. You are charged with a timeout. Seriously, this is a science site. Posting numerology is going to draw criticism. The only tolerable response is to address the criticism according to the protocols of science. Responding via personal attacks is not going to fly. And really, do you really think that attacking the person making the call is going to help your case? (That was rhetorical — this is not a topic for discussion here. You always have the option of contacting other moderators. Though I suggest you review the rules and etiquette guide before you try and defend your actions)

! Moderator Note Stop it, now. You have to expect that your hypothesis will be critiqued. Discuss the criticism without attacking the people who post it

Citing "simple intelligent thinking" is not a replacement for an actual argument. By definition, there is nothing farther north than the north pole. Once you reach the north pole, all directions are south. Imagination doesn't enter into it. Equivocation is a logical fallacy.

You appear to be addressing the quote rather than the argument that prompted it. The reference to "extinction" is not in the context of an obsolete product. You should read the entire scotus blog article using the link iNow provided.

Energy is a component of the four-vector, but this is different from saying that energy itself is a vector.

Can you express the acceleration down the slope in terms of g? Break the vector down into its components.

I don't think any of the explanations claim that the temperature drops to or below T. Just that if you have a plasma which expands, it will cool. We never got to the point where we took into account the heat transfer outward, which also leads to cooling. I hardly think it qualifies. You are still claiming to be smarter than all these PhD's put together.

Heating leads to expansion, and expansion leads to cooling. This is basic thermodynamics of the ideal gas law: PV = nRT Volume and temperature are proportional to each other. The specifics may be different for a plasma, but the basic idea is still there. I am sure we are all impressed by this, by exactly the amount we should be. T1= T+x T2 = T+x-y. T1>T2 The temperature went down. Thus, the system has cooled.

You have to displace the liquid with air. A single slit would work as long as it is not completely covered by the fluid when you pour it.

Why couldn't you just bury them?

The second article is from 2006, before Cramer did the experiment. Anything on how it turned out?

Dedicated equipment isn't always the cheapest. I recall a story about scientists buying a bunch of gaming consoles in order to build a supercomputer, because it was a cheap way of getting processing power without spending money on the extra things that come with a computer. Plus the fact that the gaming companies sell the consoles at a loss, as they expect to make the profit in the software. If scientists used smartphones as an interface, as I suggested, it might be because it's cheaper and/or more flexible than a full-blown computer, or some other component that it was replacing. Say you wanted to be able to do some kind of diagnostics interface in the field. An iphone or ipad would be a lot more convenient to lug around than a laptop, and there is software for the ipad that lets you talk to a remote computer.

! Moderator Note The arguments are old hat and thoroughly debunked elsewhere