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You do realize that even in the impossible 100% efficient system, the max thermal emission cannot exceed that which was handed to it by the sun right? The difference between the black asphalt roadway and the solar powered roadway, is that for most of the year the solar energy is powering homes. Where as the asphalt is serving as a heat island all year long.

The making of a Lego brick requires very high temperatures and enormous pieces of equipment, so machines, rather than people handle most of their creation.

When the ABS granules arrive at Lego manufacturing facilities, they're vacuumed into several storage silos. The average Lego plant has about fourteen silos, and each can hold about 33 tons of ABS granules. When production begins, the granules travel through tubes to the injection molding machines. The machines use very accurate molds --- their precision tolerance is often as little as 0.002 millimeters.

How Lego Bricks Work

SOCIAL Security is absolutely not insurance. It is guaranteed money that everyone pays in for. When you are old enough, you are guaranteed a check from the Social Security Administration every month. It is meant to be the least amount of money you can survive on in case there is nothing else, but everyone is supposed to get it.

I pay into the Social Security pot 12.4% of my income (up to $118,500/yr income when it caps out) with the understanding that when I turn 67, I get some of the money I paid in back. It is part of retirement in the US.

http://money.howstuffworks.com...

Where you could possibly be confusing Social Security as insurance comes in is if I am disabled before I reach 67 years old. Then I get a payout for the rest of my life in order to live off of that as it is assumed I will never be able to work again.

I would also add "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are the aether of the 21st century.

Dark matter is a highly scientific and technical term that means "We don't know"

Seriously.

Why is nonsense like this modded insightful?

If we "don't know", then dark matter and the theories around it would make no useful predictions. But seeing how they do make predictions, are backed by observations, and have so far held up to scrutiny then your claim of "fancy term for we don't know" doesn't hold a lot of water.

How about you toddle off to your local college/university and dig up a few research articles on the subject. There is a whole lot more to dark matter than what you've been exposed to on Slashdot.

While I respect your right to reject it, There are many things that we do not know for certain. And whether you like ot or not, The real physicists will tell you exctly what I wrote.

http://physicsandphysicists.bl...

Here http://science.howstuffworks.c...

Here http://www.space.com/20930-dar...

and a slew of other places.

Because the only way you can call it nonsense with any degree of veracity is to in the following sentence explain exactly what dark matter is.

"Dark Matter" is merely a couple words that are used to describe the effects of something that is having an action that is observable, but not explicitly known as to exactly what it is.

Is it neutrinos? Maybe. Is it some other particle as yet unknown? Possible. Is it cosmic silly string? Not likely, but possibly.

What we do know is that there is something going on that is difficult to explain using current cosmology. Since we do not know what that is, but do know that something is going on, we come up with a term.

And "dark matter" is that term.

That's subjective.

It may be subjective, but I was asking your opinion. Please, state for the record, whether you consider cultures, where kai-kaiing people is acceptable (and even heroic) to be neither better nor worse than those, where eating people is considered an outrage?

And, should your answer be affirmative, why is it, that neither UNESCO nor any other prominent organization has yet organized a Cannibalism Month (or Week) — complete with recipe-exchanges and denunciations of the evil West appropriating the authentic practice while adopting "knee-jerk" laws against it? Is not ignoring such cultures — and their unique contributions to the wonderful tapestry of diversity — evidence of despicable bigotry and closed-mindedness? Should the Western colonizers not atone for extinguishing most of such rituals?

Given your already demonstrated tendency to puh-puh inconvenient questions, I regret to inform you, that a post not containing direct answer(s) to the above will be returned unopened.

I think Google buys the book and then does the scan.

No, they borrow them from a library and scan them:

Google developed agreements with major libraries to start the project. The New York Public Library, as well as university libraries at Harvard, Michigan and Stanford, all agreed to let Google scan their volumes.

http://computer.howstuffworks....

Asserting I don't know things is an argument you lost as soon as you made it. You don't know what I do or don't know.

Presume I do know about proprietary codes. Could my statements still be true? Yes. Indeed. As a programmer who has works with these codes, I know it is complete hogwash to just wave your hands like that. Could a malicious person screw up your car through the OBD port? Yes. Can they screw with the safety systems? No. I'm sure there are ways they could cause you lots of problems, but your brakes and airbags will still be working.

You don't seem to realize that the brake and airbag computers are physically separate devices. It doesn't help your position to just presume that the proprietary codes can alter those systems. If you were more familiar with the technology, you'd understand that all the active diagnostics are in the Engine Control Module and Powertrain Control Module, which are probably the same physical device, and that device can't actuate the brake or airbag systems; all that plugs into it is the sensors to tell it when the ABS or traction control engages, and a flag that says the airbag state.

And no, traction control does NOT involve powering the wheels. If you're in gear, the engine has to change speed for a different amount of power to get delivered to the wheels. There is nothing in the wheel that has any sort of gearing that would allow for the traction computer to change the wheel power delivery separately from the engine, and the engine responds much more slowly than the traction system. And the traction computer is still running with the ECM unplugged. I could go to the top of a hill, unplug the ECM, and as long as the battery is connected I could roll down the hill and slam on the brakes, and the ABS would work perfectly. The same computer does the parking anti-roll.

The idea that the ECM could actually turn off the brake power is funny. For bonus points, find a repair manual for your vehicle, discover where in the engine the power brake boost is sourced, and then ask yourself if it makes sense that it could be disabled while the vehicle is in gear and moving. I'll give you a hint: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/...
It uses engine vacuum. Power brakes have mechanical assist. If the engine is in gear and the vehicle is moving, there will be power brakes, even with the battery disconnected. If you have an electronic brake-assist computer, you can lose that if the battery is disconnected, but the ECM can't disconnect the battery. But even if it could take that extreme step, you'd still have power brakes anytime you're in gear and moving.

I did not say anything about firewalls, so I'll assume the whole passage accusing me of believing in magic ones was just a fantasy interlude, except to reiterate that the brakes and airbags are NOT controlled by the ECM computer that is the one that shuts down a couple minutes after you turn off the car.

get a clue.

The one thing we agree on.

You claim a bunch of specific facts that if true, would support your arguments. However, they're false. All the ECM gets from the brakes and airbags are sensor readings. There are no actuators connected between the safety systems and the engine computer.

I do apologize for the typo where I wrote ODB instead of OBD.

Americans are get so scared they shit themselves all over the Constitution whenever terrorism is mentioned..... People aren't afraid of dangerous things like cars, but shit themselves over terrists.

Wrong-headed, scatological "insight." Popular claim, but just wrong.

I'd say that if you are talking about the U.S., and factor out 9/11, then the claim is perfectly valid.

I hope this makes railguns more feasible for tank-sized vehicles.

Or more compact wireless tasers...so many fun applications!

Dropping millions of trees a day could easily get us lots of forests.

http://science.howstuffworks.c...

There are simple technical solutions for most problems - the challenge is getting all the parts to agree on anything.

DID I GET IT? YES! YES! YES! I WIN!

Here is a link to more information.

- FranTaylor

vacuum cleaners range from 3000 watts to a good workout with a straw broom. are you suggesting that a 0 watt stick broom cleaner is somehow not saving power compared to using a 3000 watt vacuum? is burning 'better' than a old standby cleaner like a broom. carpet may feel nice but it uses more resource than throw rugs that are good for beating out when they get dusty. I know some people who used to collect used t-shirts and make rugs from them. too lazy to do the math but http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/question481.htm roughly if you have a 3000 watt vacuum and it takes an hour a week to clean with it, it uses about 1/7th a ton of coal a year to not get a good mostly anaerobic work out. that isn't including the energy savings of recycled rugs over carpets. or the savings in using a broom instead of a big bulky vacuum.

"b) The universe is at least 13.82 billion years"? And this is based off what we have found from Carbon Dating and other ways made up by humans.

The other way I heard explain how old earth is. Lest say this layer of earth is x old so any bones we find are also going to be this old. But any bones we find if other layers of earth are going to be x old. So there for the layer of earth is as old as the bones found in what ever layer of earth. Unless the bones are found in another layer of earth then the layer of earth is as old as the bones are.
So wait you really science has no clue ya'll just make up numbers?

*sigh* Even though I know you are just a troll. But yes, science knows because they have a broad knowledge on a lot of things that just C14

Headlights that turn have been around a while. Citroen & BMW seem to have had them. The American car, Tucker, had many such innovations. BMW also had side lights that help in tight turns. Here are some links:

1948 Tucker- great photos: http://www.laubly.com/1948tuck...
How Adaptive Headlights Work: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/...
1934 patent US1952346 A: https://www.google.com/patents...

Interacting with a car or motorcycle on a country road or mountain curve can be a pleasure, a form of meditation sometimes. We will lose that as vehicles get smarter and more independent.

It also ignores the impact of of the production and disposal of batteries and their components.

This study only analyzes one part of the equation and is far from comprehensive. A full "cradle to grave" analysis needs to be done.

But under a kilometer of water is better? :)

You won't get a tenth of that if all the ice in the world melts. Sure, a 70 meter rise in sea level would be highly disruptive, but not as disruptive as a major glacial period.

An asteroid may kill a lot of people, but it will not cause global extinction. No asteroid strike has ever completely wiped out life on earth.

Just because it has never happened in the past doesn't mean it can't happen in the future. Granted, it would take a very large asteroid and it is highly unlikely, but it is possible.

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/natural-disasters/asteroid-hits-earth.htm:

By the time you get up to a mile-wide asteroid, you are working in the 1 million megaton range. This asteroid has the energy that's 10 million times greater than the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. It's able to flatten everything for 100 to 200 miles out from ground zero. In other words, if a mile-wide asteroid were to directly hit New York City, the force of the impact probably would completely flatten every single thing from Washington D.C. to Boston, and would cause extensive damage perhaps 1,000 miles out -- that's as far away as Chicago. The amount of dust and debris thrown up into the atmosphere would block out the sun and cause most living things on the planet to perish. If an asteroid that big were to land in the ocean, it would cause massive tidal waves hundreds of feet high that would completely scrub the coastlines in the vicinity.
In other words, if an asteroid strikes Earth, it will be a really, really bad day no matter how big it is. If the asteroid is a mile in diameter, it's likely to wipe out life on the planet. Let's hope that doesn't happen anytime soon!

It might not wipe out ALL life as some sea creatures might survive and some microbes would likely hang on, but a mile wide asteroid (especially a dense one) impacting at the right speed would wipe out nearly all life on Earth.

As far as detection goes, I agree that we should be looking out for them, but suppose we found one. Suppose tomorrow it was announced that scientists just spotted a one mile wide asteroid that will collide with the Earth in two months. (Let's put the impact zone at New York City just to add to the fun.) Could we do anything about it in that time? Of course, there would be panic as the entire northeast United States (and some of Canada) tried to relocate. Politicians would give long speeches (and perhaps some of the more anti-science politicians would try to block spending any money on the problem until "more data was gathered"). Even if the world rallied around the cause instantly and everyone didn't panic (HUGE ifs), do we have the technology to alter the course of a mile wide asteroid in 2 months?

Musicians never got money from album sales. A sliver get allocated to them, and taken away again to repay the advance which the label gave them to make the album.

It entirely depends on the band, their contract, and how much they sell. The Beatles made massive piles of money even though they stopped touring halfway through their career, and the Pink Floyd "The Wall" album saved the band's members from bankruptcy while the following tour lost them all money. You can read about the structure of traditional music industry royalties here.

The short version is that on a CD sale, artists might make a 10% royalty after packaging, breakage, marketing and costs of production (advance) are subtracted. The above linked article shows how quickly that 10% shrinks, as well. Digital play royalties - unless the band is savvy and has negotiated better rates - are about half of the CD rate.

However, if you wrote the song that was performed, you will see an additional cut. And the band also gets royalties each time the song is played on the radio, or used on TV or in the movies (the writer gets an even bigger cut). So ultimately, there is still a lot of money to be made in recorded music, not just concerts and merchandise... but your music has to be popular enough to appear on the radio or other media for you to cash in. For indie bands, concerts and merchandise will be the big moneymakers of course, but they never sold much recorded music anyway.

And his radiation detectors are going crazy. Government hasn't issued any statement so far.

Those are some impressive detectors, especially since electrical transformers are a standard part of all power distribution networks and have absolutely nothing to do with radiation.

When the electrical substation providing external power to your nuclear power reactor fails, you shut down the reactor because your principal source of constant backup power has failed. Your secondary source, generators, are not intended to allow the plant to continue to operate, but to shut down cleanly.

When a tranformer blows, your risks are fire and, if it's an old transformer, PCB contamination from the old-generation transformer oils. Certainly not radiation.

Nope. You forgot about the transmission. The diesel is most efficient in a narrow RPM range. When it's connected to a generator, it can remain in that RPM range. When it's attached to a transmission that is attached to the wheels, it can't. The worst is low-speed acceleration, where electric motors do quite well.

Since you're so new to the subject, you could start here: http://science.howstuffworks.c...

I thought that charging/discharging batteries was a major source of inefficiency but it appears better than I thought: up to about 90% according to this - http://www.otherpower.com/imag... . However, there is a lot of variation under practical considerations.

In any case, comparing 35% efficiency of internal combustion directly to a battery is misleading because it fails to take into account the full cycle of generating power, transmitting it, storing in a battery, then using it. This - http://auto.howstuffworks.com/... - makes a stab at overall efficiency estimation but provides no references for its figures; it concludes that battery-powering a car is about 26% efficient as opposed to 20% for internal combustion.

Usually mining and extraction are the greatest energy and pollution generating periods of a device's life. Not greater than the entire lifecycle of use and disposal, unless the product is used less than 10 years. if its used less than 5 the impacts of mining can be even greater than the product 's use. Don't crash and total your Tesla or Prius. http://science.howstuffworks.c...

What's interesting with this home-battery is that this its use may not achieve any real energy savings, like a hybrid motor (which contributes captured friction) or like solar. Or maybe there is some lost energy in off peak hours and it contributes to efficiency, but that will be lost if the use of the product scales and every house has one. But the point is that the rare earth batteries must be mined in China, meaning a portion of the energy is being diverted to coal burned in China.

In short, you are wrong. See figure 25 from Burnham et al (PDF warning) for a nice visualization of total energy cycle CO2 emissions.

You're probably mis-remembering this debunked report. Unfortunately, it seems that that myth ("hybrids actually worse for the environment!") has grown enough legs to outrun the truth.

http://science.howstuffworks.c...

http://www.pri.org/stories/201...

"ollan describes an experiment done by animal biologist Monica Gagliano. She presented research that suggests the mimosa pudica plant can learn from experience. And, Pollan says, merely suggesting a plant could learn was so controversial that her paper was rejected by 10 scientific journals before it was finally published.

Mimosa is a plant, which looks something like a fern, that collapses its leaves temporarily when it is disturbed. So Gagliano set up a contraption that would drop the mimosa plant, without hurting it. When the plant dropped, as expected, its leaves collapsed. She kept dropping the plants every five to six seconds.

"After five or six drops, the plants would stop responding, as if they'd learned to tune out the stimulus as irrelevent," Pollan says. "This is a very important part of learning â" to learn what you can safely ignore in your environment."

Maybe the plant was just getting worn out from all the dropping? To test that, Gagliano took the plants that had stopped responding to the drops and shook them instead.

"They would continue to collapse," Pollan says. "They had made the distinction that [dropping] was a signal they could safely ignore. And what was more incredible is that [Gagliano] would retest them every week for four weeks and, for a month, they continued to remember their lesson.""

There is some debate on this, supported by observations.

http://science.howstuffworks.c...

I'd be willing to wager that intelligence monitoring of international phone calls started right about the time international phone calls were first available.

This article says the first trans-Atlantic calls was in 1927.

This article says government wiretaps started in the 1860s.

"I've always been concerned about people who can't see the negative side of all the "green", modern technologies today."

And I've found such people exist primarily in the imaginations of the people who complain about them.(I'll concede there may be some exceptions, see Einstein and the limits of human stupidity) Look, anyone with grey cells knows that windmills don't magically spring up from the ground, they have to be manufactured, and manufacturing creates pollution, especially in countries that find it inconvenient to regulate it. The question isn't "are windmills perfect?", it's "Do windmills have a smaller carbon/environmental footprint than using coal to create the same amount of power?" The consensus seems to be yes, they do.

As for the Prius, its environmental impact has been debated to death and yes, it is greener than your pickup.

Finally, "green" and "modern technologies" aren't equivalent. I'm pretty sure the president of Exxon Mobil owns a cell phone, and just as sure he couldn't give two farts about being green. The fact that tech creates pollution is not a blanket indictment of green tech. I do agree that replacing your phone every two years is wasteful, it would be nice if phone carriers provided an incentive to keep your old phone instead of the 2-year churn. They may be getting there, when my two years with AT&T was up I got a new contract that gave me a break for using my old phone.

The guillotine .. It's fast, relatively painless

So several seconds of awareness and sensation (see here; SFW as it discusses the physiology) is perfectly acceptable to you?

I don't agree that the State murdering a person when the State has deemed murder illegal to be anything other than hypocrisy.

They are not lying, just looking for data to support their pre-determined conclusion. The same as you are. Please try to avoid such partisan vitriol on such an important topic. How about calm down, admit there is a problem, your opponents have some valid points, but we don't have all the answers.

Here is a good example of a sensible moderate view:
http://people.howstuffworks.co...

exactly

they need to use these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

to modify the engine like this:

http://electronics.howstuffwor...

or do away with blades altogether, say some sort of instant one of these (i'm not saying this is easy or even possible):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Ramjets cannot produce thrust at zero airspeed; they cannot move an aircraft from a standstill.

well then figure it out damnit!

Alcohol - http://health.howstuffworks.co... Marijuana - I'm pretty sure the police officer who talked to us in 3rd grade said that we would die if we smoked marijuana. I consider death to be bad for my health ;-)

https://www.google.com/search?...

There are several articles on Taxi Scams ... no they don't happen at all /rolleyes

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/...

A common taxi driver scam is to get more money from a fare by taking the long way. While that sometimes means taking a less-than-direct route, in egregious cases it can mean driving passengers around in circles.

And if you really want the scoop on how easy it is for you to report a Long Haul just take a gander at this ...

http://www.vegaschatter.com/st...

So, you were saying?

No, Aerial reforestation is done differently.

Pure BS. Even if someone was retarded/insane enough to build such a product, no store would sell it,

Yeah because people wouldn't design such a product. (Well, to be fair, they wouldn't - but hardware, like software, can have bugs)

And even if they did make such a product, people would spot *before the thermostat got fitted* that something may go on fire months, possibly years after installation. (Remember the problem with a certain car and their brakes? Came down to a part that was worn down in a slightly unexpected way)

And nobody has ever made any defective product that has gone on fire before. (Everything from phone chargers to laptops to cars,cars,cars to washing machines...)

This link and this one for what Newton gave us.

Let's not forget the guy Newton got his optics and celestial mechanics from. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/781...

a calculated and unwarranted troll towards Christians on their numero uno holiday.

A holiday which was forced on people at knife and spear point to co-opt an already existing holiday (nice Christians ya got there), which celebrates the birth of someone who was born sometime in the spring/summer and who has inadvertently led to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people (a billion perhaps?) and which, for the most part, has turned into feeding frenzy of mass marketing Chinese-made cruft to the masses.

Now compare that to Newton who helped get us to the Moon, developed mathematical models to help explore our universe, and who contributed in numerous ways to our understanding of what goes on around us every day such as reflecting telescopes. See for example:

This link and this one for what Newton gave us.

So what did Jesus give us other than death and intolerance, as evidenced by your post?

http://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinof... http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh... http://science.howstuffworks.c... I googled that for you. Does that help?

I don't understand your comment about a dictionary. I referred to the standard definition of power - see (e.g.) http://science.howstuffworks.c... if your recollection is rusty.

As I was posting on Slashdot, I didn't think it was necessary to explain why the extract I quoted is confusing (and confused).

"...can boost 300 to 400 millivolts power to 3 to 5 volts".

Calling millivolts "power" is sloppy at best, but the real strangeness is the idea of boosting "300 to 400 millivolts power to 3 to 5 volts". Given that you can increase the voltage by a factor of 10 or so, one would normally expect that to be accompanied by a corresponding drop in current to keep the power constant. After all, you can't just pluck increased power out of nowhere by changing voltage.

And, of course, you can have a potential difference of millions of volts with no power flowing at all.

FOIA requests should not apply to police cams or 911 calls. The FOIA has a clear exemption
for where the privacy of the individual will be violated. Here is a good summary of how the
FOIA interacts with privacy laws: http://people.howstuffworks.co...

The 14th Amendment was used to grant corporations personhood rights, which happened in the 1800s.

Here is a brief explanation:

http://money.howstuffworks.com...

The film The Corporation goes into a lot more detail:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://computer.howstuffworks....

It appears to of been posted in 1999, I remember reading it a long time ago thinking are you nuts!

(might be a dupe post, wasn't logged in the first time around).

http://computer.howstuffworks....

It appears posted in 1999, I know I read it a long time ago and thought are you nuts!

Short answer: you're wrong. Longer answer: there are physical and processing differences, "significant differences" in the connectivity of the brain in men and women. If you handed a forensic scientist a human brain, you would be told what sex it was.

Start here, here, here, here and finally here.

Yes, those aren't the technical articles, but they'll point you there.

As for no difference in stomachs(5), you're wrong there as well.

And the people that supposedly witnessed this had many conflicting stories between each other as well as their own accounts over time.

Which happens with all eyewitness testimony. If you would say the same prosecutor would be reluctant to press the case if it was Brown shooting Officer Wilson, with the same amount of shifting eyewitness testimony, let me know first so I can put my coffee down.

All eyewitness testimony is unreliable. If it was Brown who killed Willson, no prosecutor in the country would have a problem with an eyewitness with shifting details.

especially since Michael Brown had just robbed a convenience store.

Especially batshit irrelevant, as the cop had no idea there was a reported robbery. Prosecutors can 'indict a ham sandwich' with a grand jury. If they didn't indict, it's because the prosecutor didn't want them to. First in the Ohio Wal-Mart murder, and now in Missouri.

To be fair, Barbie did start off as an American copy of a German sex toy. She's just getting back to her immigrant roots.

Some cars use less energy than it takes to fill you up with food so you can power a bicycle.

Nonsense.

In motion, the human body also uses energy very efficiently. For example, a person running a marathon (26 miles or 42 km) burns only about 2,600 calories. In other words, you burn only about 100 calories per mile (about 62 calories per km) when you are running.

You can see just how efficient the human body is if you compare your body to a car. A typical car in the United States gets between 15 and 30 miles per gallon of gasoline (6 to 12 km/L). A gallon of gas contains about 31,000 calories. That means that if a human being could drink gasoline instead of eating hamburgers to take in calories, a human being could run 26 miles on about one-twelfth of a gallon of gas (0.3 L). In other words, a human being gets more than 300 miles per gallon (120 km/L)! If you put a human being on a bicycle to increase the efficiency, a human being can get well over 1,000 miles per gallon (more than 500 km/L)!

A human would have approximately 5 to 10 seconds in which to respond to the tear in their suit, and if repressurized within 60 seconds, have a fairly good chance of survival.

From the source:

Has Anybody Ever Survived Vacuum Exposure in Real Life?

Human experience is discussed by Roth, in the NASA technical report Rapid (Explosive) Decompression Emergencies in Pressure-Suited Subjects. Its focus is on decompression, rather than vacuum exposure per se, but it still has a lot of good information, including the results of decompression events involving humans.

There are several cases of humans surviving exposure to vacuum worth noting. In 1966 a technician at NASA Houston was decompressed to vacuum in a space-suit test accident. This case is discussed by Roth in the reference above. He lost consciousness in 12-15 seconds. When pressure was restored after about 30 seconds of exposure, he regained consciousness, with no apparent injury sustained.

Source:
http://www.geoffreylandis.com/...

The use of a form-fitting pressure suit, like that used by a fighter pilot (or those being demoed by MIT for use on mars, which have form-fitting metal coils to supply mechanical compression) would buy the suit occupant even more time in the event of a tear in the suit by preventing ebullism, and resulting drop in blood pressure, and resulting loss of consciousness.

There are a number of potential mechanisms that could be implemented into a space suit of the MIT type, that would make abrasion type holes in the suit less lethal, such as the non-newtonian silicon shear thickening liquid that is used in ballistic vests. A thin layer of this inside the suit would harden under the pressure being exerted on it by the occupant of the suit against the reduced pressure outside, exerted through the tear. This would reduce the effects of the hard vacuum on the suit occupant, buying more time to apply an appropriate patch to the suit.

You are of course right, but just as a sidenote for those who don't know, in electronics solid-state is a broader concept than just hard disks with flash memory.

farmers do as well and the badly designed and old Northern California Altamont Pass wind farm which was built smack dab in the middle of a major migratory route for large birds does as well. Have a read of this article to compare which man-made structures cause the most bird deaths (but cats win the prize) http://science.howstuffworks.c...