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6 is for discover cards. link: http://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/debt-management/credit-card1.htm

The Predator drone already does this.

We know that Wind Energy is responsible for the deaths of lots of protected birds.

Wrong.

http://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mortality/
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/wind-turbine-kill-birds.htm

You're missing the point...

The systems they're installing on these F-16s are simple systems that allow them to program a predetermined route, or perhaps fly via a data link.

You are totally wrong here.
It has TWO pilots manning consoles, just like a Creech Airforce Base:

Each Reaper drone is operated remotely by a team of two: a pilot and a sensor operator. The pilot's primary function is flying the plane, while the sensor operator monitors the performance of the many different sensor systems (like infrared and night-vision cameras) utilized by the Reaper.

Its exactly the same system, right down to the quoted two pilots. With a Reaper, they can tell it to fly to X/Y coordinates while they have coffee, but they can also can take control of the drone, follow some terrorist on a motor bike to a meeting and launch a missile.

With an F16, they can pull 9g turns, (why in gods name would you program that in a pre-programmed flight path?). Those are maneuvers used in air combat, or missile avoidance.

Look, you can believe what you want, but the state of Missile testing and pilot training no longer requires actual drones to shoot down. That's so 1965.

Your average observer would probably call it a snake and ignore it.

But its eyelids, jaws and the fact that it can shed its tail in an emergency makes it a lizard, and not a snake.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/zoology/reptiles-amphibians/legless-lizard-vs-snake1.htm

That was my thought. African lakes have killed hundreds due to escaping trapped gas. Carbon sequestration is like deferring on paying a credit card bill. You avoid paying a lot now, but will have to pay a whole lot later.

No offense, but you need to sit down with a good book on general relativity. (I like Sean Carroll's Spacetime and Geometry. YMMV.)

Hawking proved... No, he did not.

Unless of course, He did. The physics checks out; We've recreated the conditions in the lab. A direct observation is rather difficult because of the aforementioned alignment issue with blackholes -- in fact, every theory of black holes suffers the same problem of a lack of observation being, well, you know... black holes. Hawking's theories are the best-fit model to date, and until and unless better evidence comes along, that's what most physicists are going with... as you, yourself, pointed out.

Highly charged particles are emitted at the poles of a black hole... No, they are not.

the black hole itself is also rotating at the speed of light... No, it is not.

You get one or the other. Any theory you care to pick; You don't get both. If it's not rotating at the speed of light, then the particles do not 'think' better of it and shoot out the poles... where would they get the energy to escape from the accretion disk then? You can't escape gravity without energy to counter-act it. I'd love to hear your ideas about how those jets are blasting out particles without some kind of gravitational force pushing them back out -- the kind of gravitational force that, near an event horizon, can only come by something capable of vectoring it away at near the speed of light .. like, I don't know, something rotating at the speed of light with the gravitational force of, say, a black hole.

The area around an accreting black hole is perhaps the most violent spot imaginable in the universe; it should be no surprise whatsoever that once something has gone around the accretion disc a few million times it would have enough kinetic energy to go like hell off in another direction as soon as it collides with another particle.

Well thank you. And how, exactly, do you propose that two objects interact with each other's gravity, and yet only one of them accelerates? Everywhere else in physics, when an object in space passes at a right angle to another, they affect each other's orbits -- and, wait for it -- their spin too. Now if this is happening constantly around a black hole, how exactly do you conclude that it's ... not rotating?

Allow me to clear up your confusion on this matter, as although I haven't read your pet book, I do understand something more basic: There are many types of black holes.

The physics I outlined above is accurate for a rotating black hole. However, here's the glitch that you missed: Non-rotating black holes also emit energy. See that first blurb about Hawking radiation I posted above -- whether it's rotating or not, it emits radiation. The only thing rotation does is concentrate the emissions at the poles... the accretion disk does cause a lot more matter to be ejected at the poles as spacetime is locally deformed there and they can pickup enough energy to bounce off... but not all black holes have an accretion disk, and hawking radiation doesn't depend on rotation; It depends on phenomena that happens at the event horizon where virtual particle pairs are pulled apart...

The reason it can't be observed is because this radiation occurs in such a small quantity over such a long period of time, and at such low energy levels... that we haven't yet found a black hole close enough that current technology could directly observe it.

But to just handwave and say "no, no, no..." to one of the most interesting problems in physics is stupid. Science isn't about absolute proof, it's about the best fit model. And what I've stated... th

Nuclear accidents have not been proven to have killed a single person.

Sa- wha- hah? What kind of logic are you spewing? Fukishama may have gotten a wiki[1] entry citing a "no deaths directly attributed" death toll, but that is by no means a trustworthy represenation of fact. Radiation poisoning[2] is a very real and well understood consequence of exposure. DNA becomes damaged and cancer results from both short term and long term exposure[3]. Sometimes the cancers can take decades to develop before actually killing you[4]. Tepco has been lying about radiation levels[5] for a long time and will continue to do so to keep people guessing about the truth. Stop helping them spread it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll
[2] http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/radiation-sickness/DS00432
[3] http://science.howstuffworks.com/radiation-sickness.htm
[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/19/fukushima-workers-risk-thyroid-cancer_n_3622529.html
[5] http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=26707

One of the problems facing astronauts: long periods of microgravity cause bone and muscle loss. I've read science fiction stories where people had to take pills to maintain their bones and muscles; they called them "gravity pills".

If this drug really works, I'm wondering if the astronauts in the space station, future Mars missions, etc. might wind up taking it drug routinely.

Probably a Mars mission will need to have some sort of rotating crew module to produce a gravity-like acceleration, as it will likely require at least seven months for the trip.

Thanks..... who the heck measures a liquid by weight?

But.... 75,000 gallons is a pittance, given that there are 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons on earth. So, that's 12 trillion years worth.....

Not to say they'd be in the poor house, but if all the top 25 people decided to drop their entire fortune into something like this that "worth" would drop top 1% of what it is now and the companies that they are invested in would go under.

As Bill Gates put it, "I am forever tied to Microsoft."

http://money.howstuffworks.com/richest-person1.htm

It shouldn't really be considered high risk. Brakes are important enough that engineers designed in a second redundant braking system. The parking brake is still connected to the brakes by a steel cable. It will work even if the electronics or hydraulics on the brake pedal fails.

The problem is most drivers don't know that it's a redundant system, and never think of trying the parking brake if the brake pedal fails. This is one area where linguistic drift has hurt us. They were originally called the emergency brake, whose name clearly implies they're to be used in an emergency if the regular brakes fail. But since they were also used to keep manual transmission cars from rolling when parked, they've colloquially been called parking brakes. To the point where most people refer to them as parking brakes now and don't know about their emergency braking function.

There was a similar study on this surrounding laser printers.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/printer-health.htm

Indeed: http://www.howstuffworks.com/search.php?terms=fracking

The main issue does not appear to be that a properly administered site leaks fracking fluids into the drinking water... it's that most sites have no oversight and don't always handle the fracking fluids properly.

While it's useful to know that there isn't contamination from the properly injected deep-seam fracking fluids, this doesn't really help the people who are victims of sites where the injection column lelaked at drinking water levels, extra fluid was dumped at ground level, or any of the other hundreds of possible things that could happen... happened.

Your attempt to put a false balance between the costs of these various technologies is more than a little bit of a reach. The windmill/bird death thing is pretty much a myth.

The materials used in solar panels are constantly changing with new technology. Any "strip mining" that occurs is because some of the materials are imported from China. There is no technical reason that this couldn't be done in a much more sustainable way, and there are new operations spinning up in California that plan on mining the materials locally.

If a dam blocks a river, then somebody built it wrong.

I was hopefully clearing things up by linking factual information, right down to the connection between the Social Security Administration and the "Carnivore" program (the real meat of the article).

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/carnivore.htm

"... something was lost in the translation."

Let me help you out with that...

http://www.howstuffworks.com/social-security-number2.htm

I personally have a feeling it has more to do with ancient DNA triggering a process of maturation. Holing up in a room reminds me of how worker drones are bred in the honeycombs of beehives: http://science.howstuffworks.com/zoology/insects-arachnids/bee4.htm. This is a simply human realization of this process that certain classes of people go through, just like certain bees are bred in the bee colony go through a similar process to become full fledged adult workers.

Interestingly, when we are in the embryonic stage of development, we actually do have two hearts. The heart primordia (which describes the stage of the heart's development) in the embryonic stage is actually two hearts, which eventually fuse together into one heart with four chambers. Embryologists in the 1920s and '30s kept the heart primordia from fusing in embryonic frogs, and the frogs that grew up developed two hearts. The same also goes for our eyes. We begin with one primordia of the eye, which eventually separates to form two. If the primordia is kept from splitting, one central eye develops, like a cyclops, says Dr. Neff.

A quick web search reveals people who actually do (or did) have two hearts. Here's one about a guy who was born with 3 legs and two hearts!

In the summer of 1906 George Lippert died of tuberculosis at the age 62. The autopsy revealed his two hearts and also showed that one heart died two to three weeks before his eventual death. Doctors declared that if Lippert had not had tuberculosis he could have easy lived on for many years. He would have been sustained by his secondary heart.

Do you really care if someone calls Pluto a planet instead of the more precise term dwarf planet?

Nature doesn't have to organize itself into neat little boxes for easy categorization. If the message is understood, even with non-precise language, the message is still understood.

Also with regard to your concern for definition:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/soft-tissue-dinosaur-fossil.htm

Wrong about this topic too.
Man you just can't catch a break.

Few or no "regular" mass market car needs more than regular gas.
Some luxury or performance cars, with a high performance engine with high compression ratios, will run more efficiently with it, but even then its not required because of the anti-knock sensors that are standard and have been for a while now. you lose a little performance, but they adjust the timing.

Read the manual.
If it says the words "premium required" then fine, you might actually need it.
If says "recommended" or nothing at all, and this is the overwhelming majority of vehicles, then premium is a waste of $$.

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/premium-gas-luxury-vehicles.htm
http://lifehacker.com/5846880/should-i-use-premium-gas-in-my-car

Do you have a single clue how Public Key encryption works do you?

Start here: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/encryption3.htm

Seriously are you freakin' kidding me? Yes... Yes.. YES everyone's child is a freaking super-genius. Right. Oh... and gads... this one can actualy READ by the 8th grade. How wonderfully miraculous.

You apparently are unaware of the quick chargers. It's still a very long time compared to filling up a gas car, but J1772 chargers are much faster than "8-12 hours to fully charge". You're talking about charging from a regular wall outlet.

I don't have a good time estimate, but the old article http://www.howstuffworks.com/rapid-charging-for-electric-car-batteries.htm
says "It can take an electric vehicle from dead to nearly full -- about 80 percent charged -- in under half an hour."

IIRC in a dome all the stresses are compressive.

Eh... I am fairly certain it depends on the arch/dome curvature. Here's a HowStuffWorks cite:

"But as with beams and trusses, even the mighty arch can't outrun physics forever. The greater the degree of curvature (the larger the semicircle of the arch), the greater the effects of tension on the underside of the bridge.

It makes sense: if you have a very low curvature the arch/dome trends toward being a flat beam and is obviously is experiencing tension. You can try to counterbalance that by building more support structure to counteract the tension by compressing the low curvature beam, but then we are quickly approaching the concept that prestressed concrete accomplishes intrinsically.

I will say that it is a shame we don't see as many flying buttresses anymore (haha).

There is a type of freezer that can operate using a heat source for power (strange but true).

I'm, guessing that's what he meant anyway.

I'm not aware of any prior art.

The Nokia 6131 NFC debuted at CES2007.

For that matter, all my credit cards have had passive NFC chips in them for the past few years. I have yet to see a reader work with them though - Every now and then I try just waving my card near a reader with the usurped volume symbol on it, only to have the cashier look at me like I have two heads because it never works and no one uses it.

Putting the same tech in a heavier device doesn't really seem like much of a win. Yes, most people already have one; how often do you lose or break your phone compared to your credit cards, however? I've killed three phones in my adult life, but have yet to break or lose a credit card. And that doesn't consider things like dead batteries, no cell service, etc.

You don't need a stirling engine for that. Just some ammonia, water and stuff, and you can use the heat directly to cool your house...
How stuff works - gas burning refridgerator

I do not believe that the Fed increasing the money supply results in inflation and here's why. How do we know how much money OUGHT to be in the system at any given time? There are literally billions of people trying to join the economy and get paid wages that will permit them to buy modern conveniences and a higher standard of living. Without more money, they will not be able to do that. The price of a computer chip is related to not just demand , but also the real cost (indebtedness) AMD , say, has incurred in producing the chip. They can't sell them to impoverished Chinese in the countryside for six cents and stay in business. The impoverished people have to be raised up to meet the system. That money has to come from somewhere.

There used to (recently) be about 60 trillion dollars of money in the economy, floating around in the world , with about 1 trillion literal US dollars- paper and coinage. .

http://money.howstuffworks.com/how-much-money-is-in-the-world.htm

There are 7 billion people in the world. That means if everything for everyone was equal, we'd all get 8,500 bucks, but only 1/60th of that would be *real* dollars as you mean the term (the Fed calls this kind of literal money M1 ).

That's not a lot of money. The Fed adding money tot he world's economy is not going to spark inflation because inflation IS NOT an increase in the money supply, it's an increase in the cost of goods and services .

More people means more services and more opportunity and therefore the need for more money . This is not inflationary, it's "expansionary" and they are NOT the same thing.

HTH.

You're not a programmer are you? There's no such thing as bug-free code. Just like no writer can proof read his own novel, no programmer can truely find every bug in his own code.

It is a sad commentary on programmers as a group that statements like this are posted, and worse that they garner so much support from the chattering masses. Excellent programmers always strive to write code with few bugs; and sometimes they succeed. I personally wrote a package of high-precision arithmetic calculations that was used for many years by a prominent Wall Street firm, and am quite sure (for a variety of sound reasons, not just "belief") that this software (about 4,000 lines of C) is bug-free. For examples that are more publicly known, consider the 420,000 lines of code in the space shuttle, which had a total of 17 detected bugs in 11 major releases (see Good Question – How does NASA write perfect code for the space shuttle computers? by Marshall Brain, May 27, 2009); the whole system is not perfect, but major subsystems are.

No you are wrong.
"Many of our rules are violations of that first most basic right, pretty much anything that someone else thinks that you should do or not-do for your own good: rules about drugs, prostitution, abortion, doctor-assisted suicide, and yes, wearing clothes. "
Let's tear this apart one by one.

'rules about drugs"
No you are wrong. http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/human-biology/medical-quackery.htm#page=0 not to mention FDA testing of drugs for safety and effectiveness. You are probably talking about recreational drugs but even then you will want laws to keep them safe and more or less pure and not mixed with who knows what.

"abortion,"
No you are wrong. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/us/kermit-gosnell-abortion-doctor-found-guilty-of-murder.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Even if you support abortion rights if you are not a total nut job you will want laws that make them safe like requiring a doctor perform them.

"prostitution"
No you are wrong. Even if you believe that prostituion should be legal you would want laws regulating the minimum age of the prositute and health checks of the workers.

"doctor-assisted suicide"
Yea what could go wrong with that. Again you would want laws to make sure that the patient understood and that they where not pressured into such a choice.

"wearing clothes"
Like hell! Don't you know that the only people that want to walk around naked are people that nobody wants to see naked?

This is all just extreme libertarian clap trap. It is as unworkable as anything Marx or Ayn Rand ever came up with. And just as with Marx and Rand it is too extreme and over simplified to be workable. What I am pointing out is that you are wrong. You really do not want to get ride of laws on those subjects. You want different laws that reflect your world view. There is nothing wrong with that just work within the system and change the laws and stop pretending you want to get rid of laws on those subjects because frankly they are needed.

I'm not expecting a "major technological breakthrough" either; whether adoption is "anytime soon" is a matter of definition of "soon."

I figure 'soon' equates to 'when someone like my mom would buy one.' which means it has to be good for daily driving and the occasional 400-mile road trip to visit family across the state.

today's "daily commute only, no long road trips" range cars

Which cars are those? All the models I know of are capable of both (granted, due greatly in part to existing gasoline-based infrastructure). Anyway, a gasoline ForTwo can theoretically go from KC to STL on a single tank (71 MPG, 8.7 gal tank), whereas the electric model (84 mi on a full charge) would have to be charged at least 3 times one way, at 8 hours per charge.

will, in a decade or two, be up to the full range of gas vehicles.

"A decade or two" is a long friggin' time. Who knows what we'll come up with between now and then? (P.S. this is why I think futurists, AKA self-proclaimed oracles, are idiots).

Over the same time period, suitable infrastructure will get gradually rolled out into place.

Right... and in the 1960's, they were convinced that 20 years in the future we'd all have jetpacks and live on space colonies. Pure speculation, then and now.

By the way, do you have any reference about battery production --- for the types going into current and near future electric cars --- being "insanely polluting," comparable to the insane level of pollution released over the lifetime of a gasoline car? I've seen various FUD articles trying to "prove" points like that, but nothing that actually stands up to much scrutiny.

Funny, in my research I saw the opposite - various articles that tried to downplay the fact that hybrids and EVs pollute as much if not more than their gasoline or diesel counterparts. C'est la vie, eh, mon frere?

Anyway, here are some links:

http://www.auto123.com/en/news/hybrid-and-ev-production-pollutes-more-than-gas-cars-but?artid=132278

http://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2012/04/electric-cars-may-pollute-more-than-gas-models-study.html

http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/14/why-electric-cars-are-more-polluting-than-gas-guzzlers-at-least-in-china/

http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/does-hybrid-car-production-waste-offset-hybrid-benefits1.htm

Cheers.

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/edible-innovations/food2.htm

Monosaccharides and disaccharides are called simple carbohydrates. They are also sugars -- they all taste sweet. They all digest quickly and enter the bloodstream quickly.

Sucrose is broken up by sucrase and then enters the bloodstream. I wasnt able to find a "rate", but generally the "rate" is "fast"-- think about how quickly you get a sugar rush from HFCS vs sucrose; Im unaware of a difference, and the "rush" is once it has hit your bloodstream.

Im not aware of any studies except for one highly-debated one (harvard I think-- and it had a lot of issues with unequal tests and poor controls) that have shown ANY difference between the two in terms of diet; and none that I am aware of have shown any mechanism whereby it might make a difference.

The above was from memory. This 7-page How Stuff Works article is from the first hit of a google search of "HFCS vs sugar".

"The premise is that there remain incalculable and little-understood carbon fuel assets which far outweigh all the fossil fuels ever discovered"

Methane locked up in ICE, which when melted escapes mostly to the atmosphere and is an even more efficient source of greenhouse gas.

A lot, since TPB does not serve the video. All it does is coordinate BitTorrent clients, and said protocol has no provisions for streaming. To BT, file is a file and the idea is to exchange semi-randomly chosen chunks of each file between clients like you and me until everyone has a whole copy. So, there's no sequence in the content and you'll watch each file when it's complete (you can pick which files to download so you can start viewing ASAP, and some clients can fetch the first&last pieces of each file first so you can check the quality, language and such).

Here's a more graphical description: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/bittorrent2.htm

Maybe you're thinking of services like Cuevana. These keep lists of traditional RapidShare/Depositfiles/Mega/etc downloads, and provide you with a browser extension to uncompress and view the file as it downloads.

I don't think you have checked the clients recently. The current bittorrent client does include a streaming option to view the file(s) as they download. Of course this does require that you are downloading an actual streamable(sp?) file but the functionality is there. Now for files that are separated into chunks that must be reintegrated after the fact that may not work, but for most mp4 and similar types you can stream as you download.

A lot, since TPB does not serve the video. All it does is coordinate BitTorrent clients, and said protocol has no provisions for streaming. To BT, file is a file and the idea is to exchange semi-randomly chosen chunks of each file between clients like you and me until everyone has a whole copy. So, there's no sequence in the content and you'll watch each file when it's complete (you can pick which files to download so you can start viewing ASAP, and some clients can fetch the first&last pieces of each file first so you can check the quality, language and such).

Here's a more graphical description: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/bittorrent2.htm

Maybe you're thinking of services like Cuevana. These keep lists of traditional RapidShare/Depositfiles/Mega/etc downloads, and provide you with a browser extension to uncompress and view the file as it downloads.

...our planet is heating up so fast that by some estimates, in another 20 years we won't have ice in antarctica.

That's a fairly alarmist claim. Where did you read that? Because, you know, it seems like the risk of 200+ foot rise in sea levels due to *all* the antarctic ice melting within 20 years might be getting a little more attention.

...you know, like perhaps by the Dutch, who wouldn't have a country anymore. Oh, and maybe New York could start building a dome as some sort of post-apocalyptic bastion.

My own server gets dozens of ssh-probes per day -- if I were running Windows or even an older BSD or Linux distribution out of the box, some of them might have had succeeded by now. Popular PHP software packages hosted by major providers are exploited regularly. There is no doubt, criminals are doing it.

And some (most?) of such criminals are sufficiently "patriotic" to be usable by their governments for cyber-warfare, when they see fit. This happened before and will happen again.

From the article:
thunderstorms unleash sprays of X-rays and even intense bursts of gamma rays

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/radiation3.htm:
Beta particles can be stopped or reduced by a layer of clothing or a substance like aluminum .... Gamma rays often accompany alpha and beta particles. Unlike alpha and beta particles, they are extremely penetrating. In fact, several inches of lead or even a few feet of concrete are required to stop gamma rays. ... X-rays ... aren't quite as penetrating as gamma rays, and just a few millimeters of lead can stop them

On top of that, the aluminum body of an airplane has *lots* of holes in it (windows, control avionics, etc).

The problem with wind farms isn't just the silly people surrounding it but the ecological risks and damage done. In NA our bat populations are critically endangered and being destroyed by the pressure differential caused by various wind farms, if you bother to count the bodies. It sounds OK until you realize that bats are incredibly useful, they pollinate more than bees do, they control more insect pest populations than anything else. A single bat can eat many thousands of mosquitoes in a night.

In countries with more wind farms the damage is magnified. See Costa Rica. If only more people even gave a shit.

Do you have actual data to back up how many bats are being killing by wind gennies? I recalled people opposed to wind gennies saying they killed a lot of birds. However studies have shown cats kill more birds than wind generators. The article Do wind turbines kill birds? has a chart of statistics showing how many birds are killed by different things, from cars, wild and feral cats (but not pet cats?), to windows. Some may have a problem with the chart though, out of seven killers of birds 5 of the statistics are provided by the American Wind Energy Association, one by treehugger, and one by American Bird Conservancy. Sciam asks the question Are Wind Turbines Getting More Bird and Bat-Friendly? It partially answers by saying stake holders from AWEA, ABC, and National Audubon are working on ways to reduce bird and bat mortality rates.

Falcon

The Stuff You Should Know podcast episode from Dec 15th 2010 is entitled "How Earthworms Work". It actually had some fascinating things discussed, including the distance that they can move per year and how far they can migrate in a year.

Apparently all earthworms in North American were killed in the last Ice Age. All Earthworms we have now are immigrants from Asia and Europe that hitched a ride on plant roots brought over in very recent human migration.

If you assume the biomass and metabolisms are roughly equivalent now and then.
More biomass, faster metabolism (especially with O2 users vs. producers).

From Wikipedia - Atmospheric O2:
5×10^18 kg x 0.20946 = 1×10^18 kg

For people: http://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/respiratory/question98.htm
550 L * Mol/Liter * 0.032kg/mol = 17.6 kg
With 365.25 day/year and 7 billion people, this is: 4.5 * 10^13kg/year
Humanity, with zero population growth could go for 100,000 years without exhausting the complete O2 supply (though probably more like 25k, if we assume we need O2 levels of at least 15%).

Using the wet biomass, taking out the non-photosynthetics in the table, and assuming the average terrestrial uses the same O2 as humans per kg, aquatic at 50% and 10% for the rest (yes, these percents are out of my ass, though terrestrial should be fairly close).
Terrestrial:
== 7.6 * 10^14kg/year ( < 2000 years, complete use)
Aquatic: (using 3:1 wet:dry weight estimate, since it's not listed. Removing cyanobacteria, and krill, Should be higher, but I'm aiming for a "best case" scenario)
== 2.5 * 10^14kg/year
Fungal (25% of average, of the rest @ 10% human O2 consumption):
== 1.3 * 10^15kg/year

all three together give us 417 years. If we assume humans need 15% O2, that's 104.1 years.

Notice that there are a lot of species not mentioned there, and this doesn't include microbial O2 consumers other than fungi, nor does it include a lot of macroscopic O2 producers. I would be surprised if adding those in didn't decrease the timespan to less than 20 years.

It depends on the situation but I don't I don't think an hour in stop and go traffic will deplete the batteries of even current generation electric cars (see http://auto.howstuffworks.com/can-electric-cars-survive-major-traffic-jams.htm). The Nissan leaf normally has a 100 mile radius, under ideal conditions that wouldn't have covered the round trip commute for my last job, 56 miles (I lived out west in the mountains and there was no traffic). The link states that stop and go traffic on a cold day reduced the range to 62 miles. That is still several hours of stop and go traffic. In DC, for example that would allow a round trip to a location about 20 miles outside the beltway (last time I lived there that would put you on about an hour and a half commute each way). I think it would be safe to say that if your one way commute is less than 25 miles or less than 2 hours, you are probably OK with an all electric car. However, if your one way commute is greater than 25 miles or 2 hours, you probably need a hybrid or gasoline car. I can't speak for NYC but in DC the majority of people who commuted into the district itself lived within the shorter limit.

Personally, I wouldn't mind living near a wind farm; however, I've seen all the feedback from people who actually live near them, and it tends to be negative.

They really aren't much like windmills; partly because there are so m any turbines.

Here's some actual reports though:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/david-dodge/living-near-a-wind-farm_b_1910707.html
http://mywinddiary.blogspot.ca/
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/wind-turbines-health.htm
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/07/11/pol-cp-wind-turbines-health-canada-study.html

Almost right, except the best chemical to mix with BSD is acid.

People seem to forget in orbital mechanics, to move in one direction, you have to displace an equal amount of mass x energy in the opposite direction.

Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't E=MC^2 essentially say that mass and energy are equivalent?

I am guessing what people are trying to get at is that nuclear weapons are super powerful and that exploding them on the side of the planet currently facing the inside of the orbit would result in a push outwards from that orbit...

But what they failed to realize is that E really does equal MC^2. If you want to compare the energy of atomic bombs to the energy required to move the planet then you need to actually consider how much energy the planet holds in rest mass...

Rough numbers here:
More energy than all of the nuclear weapons combined:

Maximum yield of a nuclear weapon built so far is about 50 Megatons. In 2002 there were about 40,000 nuclear weapons in the world (according to wikipedia). If we assume those were all 50 Megaton weapons (a gross exageration), that gives us a total of 2 million, or 2 * 10^6 megatons.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-257219.html

The planet seems to have roughly 6x10^1024 kilograms of mass.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/planet-earth-weigh.htm

To compare like against like, we need to turn the rest mass of the planet into the same energy as an atomic bomb... so: E= MC^2 is
E=6x10^1024 x 9x10^16
E=~5x10^1041

So we are talking about using ~2x10^15 kilograms to have an effect on ~5x10^1041 kilograms.

In short, the orbital change will be so miniscule that it is not even worth calculating... especially since I do not know the math of orbital mechanics.

I’ve posted all my streaming data for the month my “content” went live.

Just take a look at the typical compensation

Internet royalties With the explosion of the Internet and the ease of downloading music onto your computer, a whole new royalty arena has opened up in recent years. Record companies usually treat downloads as "new media/technology," which means they can reduce the royalty by 20% to 50%. This means that rather than paying artists a 10% royalty on recording sales, they can pay them a 5% to 8% rate when their song is downloaded from the Internet. In the case of downloaded music, although there is no packaging expense, many record company contracts still state that the 25% packaging fee will be deducted.

this reeks of non-news trumped up (by the new York times) with a jab at the scale goat, I mean piracy, for good measure..

Your joke was already used by HowStuffWorks

Using some worst case / high profit scenarios.. It's not overly technical..

Here's a fascinating article where the true costs of bandwidth are calculated by yielding very high profits (300%) with a worst case scenario where all customers want to watch 3 hi-def shows / customer (3 people in the same house) streamed simultaneously.. The costs are still very low.. I really do urge you all to read this article written in 2011.. It really puts things in perspective and shows just how greedy these corporations are...

http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2011/04/07/what-does-a-gigabyte-of-internet-service-really-cost-a-look-at-the-worst-case-scenario/