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Except you have lots of jaggy sawtooth peaks where there are NO glaciers and U shaped valleys where there are glaciers.

As for mountains eroding at a millimeter per, I'd like to know how they calculated that. If they simply measure the sediment in melt water and extrapolate that to cubit meters of rock and spread it over the entire watershed they would find that glaciated areas drop a lot more sediment than non-glaciated areas.

On the other hand if they are doing actual height measurements, how do they arrive at that level of precision, or explain the fact that there is no visible or measurable sign of millimeter depth erosion on the tops of mountains?

• Box Jellyfish
• salties
• sea snakes
• blue ringed octopus
• stonefish

• Note that of this list of the 10 most dangerous animals in Australia, five are marine.

Quote by Bill Gates, of Microsoft, when asked if he would develop software for the NeXT computer: "Develop for it? I'll piss on it."
http://library.thinkquest.org/22522/quotes.html

(For those who don't recall their computer history, Apple's iOS comes from OPENSTEP, which Apple got when it bought NeXT, and OPENSTEP was the upgrade from NeXTstep which implemented the OPENSTEP standard for NeXT Computers.)

Hopefully this means we'll see a version of OneNote for Mac OS X --- it'd be a nice gesture if they'd bring back Apple's MacBASIC which BG bought for the princely sum of $1 so he could bury it --- http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt .

Domestic violence all but disappeared. Crime in general dropped dramatically.

Really? So one quarter of all women are all but nothing then? And your crime comment is just ridiculous...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_the_United_States
http://library.thinkquest.org/04oct/00492/Crime.htm

A lot of people think that we are utterly dependent on burning oil for energy for our modern existence, but this is patently untrue. One example of potential independence is biodiesel. I own two diesels (a car and a truck) and I put biodiesel into them when I can, but it costs significantly more than petroleum diesel. This is due to the tax breaks given to Big Oil, and the fact that no one is paying for the major externality of burning petrofuels, carbon dioxide. The US government proved at Sandia NREL in the 1980s that producing biodiesel from algae grown in open raceway ponds was not only feasible, but that it should be profitable with diesel fuel retailing at $3/gallon.

We could easily replace our diesel fuel consumption with only a relatively small amount of land. Unfortunately, virtually all the land not already in use that is useful for this process is controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, and they have approved only a tiny portion of renewable energy projects proposed for BLM land even when it is shown to be beneficial. What chance is there to undertake a massive project like replacing a significant portion of our diesel consumption with biodiesel from algae?

Our own federal government has already shown that replacing diesel-based fossil fuels in transportation with algae is feasible, and it is likewise our own federal government that prevents any such projects going forward, largely through the Bureau of Land Management. Would anyone like a tax break on oil production, while we're here?

Sally Ride taught the world about how our lives should never be taken for granted. Farewell Dr. Ride. http://womenshistory.about.com/od/aviationspace/p/sally_ride.htm . Ms. Ride's Facebook resume: www.facebook.com/sallyridescience/info . http://library.thinkquest.org/4034/ride.html . Wikipedia http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Ride

Tropical rain forest is actually not a very good soil, if you try to use it as farmland you'll probably end up with a desert.
http://library.thinkquest.org/C0113340/text/biomes/biomes.rainforest.soil.html

Bara the bomb sniffing dog:
http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0210580/bombsniffingbara.htm
I've also heard of two drug sniffing beagles at an Australian airport called "smack" and "horse" :)

Perhaps "voting with your wallet" will do it, but then again it will take a long time, an expensive effort, and people caring to make it happen.

Unfortunately, nobody cares enough. Did people even reduce their purchases of new electronics when they learned about the conflict minerals situation, or did they forget about the war the minute they saw a new cell phone on the market? Did people stop buying sneakers when they found out that children were being forced to work to produce the shoes? People in America simply do not care about the troubles of other countries, as long as they can continue to live comfortable high-tech lives.

If people were willing to do something like this, we could affect change:

http://library.thinkquest.org/26504/

Smash the capitalist state! Expropriate the bourgeoisie! Forward to socialism!!!!!!! READ TROTSKY!!!!

Capitalism provides you with what you wear and eat.

And it does a bad job at that

Capitalism provides you with the internet for you to make a fool of yourself on.

I'm quite certain that the internet would also have developed without capitalism if only the technology is there.

Capitalism is not evil, greed and corrupt is and both were rampant among the party leadership in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union proved that state socialism does not work.

Real socialist usually call the Soviet Union (and the other countries of the former east block) state capitalist, because the country was run like one big company and most people had to make a living selling themselves into wage labour. Even if you insist to call the Soviet Union state socialist that doesn't mean that a liberal socialism can not work. Greed, on the other hand thrives in capitalism.

If you want to redistribute your wealth, do so by your own choice. It's called "charity".

Charity is a nice way to calm the consciousness, but in the end it is humiliating for those at the receiving side (if they have no other way of sustaining their life - I'm not talking about the charity to help victims of natural disasters). Better it is to change the society to make it possible for everyone to live a life in dignity.

Socialism is about slavery and coercion rather than freedom and good will.

This is Capitalism, in capitalism you have to sell yourself into wage labour, in capitalism most people don't have the economic freedom to choose their life freely. And talk about good will next time someone gets fired to increase the profits of the stock holders.

However, people have been using it for decades as slang for a passenger vehicle, which proves my point that the meaning of a word is defined by how people use it. Hence, today's definition of a "smartphone" is not the same as the one 2 decades ago. Meanings change. Those earlier phones are no longer considered smartphones by people - they're at best "feature phones".

how words change
more examples
more

Think of it - if someone said they were gay 100 years ago, it meant something completely different. Meanings change.

A more recent example - the definition of marriage no longer means a union between a man and a woman, but between two people or either sex or gender (and some places recognize 3 or more people as well).

Asteroid 2011 MD was estimated to be 25 to 55 feet which is in the "Local Damage" asteroid range whose impacts occur about 1 – 10 times per century.

BTW, that's "Local Damage" only if you're not local to the damage; else, it's lethal damage.

Left off some stuff:
- Amiga mouse (right side) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amiga500_system.jpg
- C=64 mouse: http://www.virtualsky.net/iadoremyc64/gallery/1351_mouse.jpg
- Atari joystick http://library.thinkquest.org/06aug/01856/media/AtariJoystick.jpg
- Epyx joystick http://mimg.ugo.com/201103/4/5/7/183754/epyx.jpg
- Commodore joystick http://www.itwissen.info/bilder/commodore-joystick.png
- Atari Trakball http://a10.idata.over-blog.com/400x533/1/27/40/16/Joypads-divers/2600-trak-ball.jpg

Actually, there is very little more dangerous than trying to burn past xenon poisoning without the cool down time. As soon as you make headway, the reactor tends to naturally run away (just like what happened). That is, it creates a strong and fast positive feedback situation.

From http://library.thinkquest.org/3426/data/disaster/timeline.html:

1:00-1:20 am The operator forced the reactor up to 7% power by removing all but 6 of the control rods. This was a violation of porcedure and the reactor was never built to operate at such low power. The RBMK reactor is unstable when its core is filled with water. The operator tried to take over the flow of the water which was returning from the turbine manually which is very difficult because small temperature changes can cause large power fluctuations. The operator was not succesful in getting the flow of water corrected and the reactor was getting increasingly unstable. The operator disabled emergency shutdown procedures because a shutdown would abort the test.

So, not ALL were removed, but more than permitted were and under low coolant flow conditions with the automatic SCRAM disabled in an attempt to burn past the xenon poisoning. The xenon buildup, in turn was due to lowering the power level more than intended very quickly. At that point, the correct procedure was to let it shut down and allow the xenon to decay, then do a proper restart (after a few days).

Even with all of that, they probably could have still managed a safe shutdown and just scrubbed the test. But even though the test couldn't possibly be valid anymore, they went through the motions of it (so they could tick those all important checkboxes on the forms for the bureaucracy in Moscow) and tripped the turbines, resulting in a further reduction of primary coolant flow and in sudden heating and steam cavitation of the coolant water. In normal operations, there would have been more rods in the core to limit the excursion rate and they could still have performed a safe shutdown. However, when they FINALLY realized they'd screwed up very badly and were about to have an accident, THEN they finally initiated a SCRAM and then the carbon tips of the control rods came into play, further increasing the reaction rate until output reached 10,000% of maximum.

Like most disasters, there were a lot of contributing and confounding factors. However, it's still perfectly fair to say that if safe operation had been more important than the bureaucrats in Moscow in the minds of the operators, it wouldn't have happened, even with such a terrible reactor design.

I suppose you don't understand the concepts behind humour. You might want to perhaps spend a few years analysing for example "banter", "irony" and "wit", then come back and give a report on my comment. Don't make me explain the joke.

I'm seeing the exact same thing. I find that Google is becoming more and more useless for academic research. I would once type in a subject and get tons of legitimate, informative sites written by people who cared about the subjectmatter (remember ThinkQuest? All those fantastic articles are still out there, they just aren't in Google's search results anymore), which I could use as a springboard into deeper research. Now I get Wikipedia as the first result and fifty pages of forums filled with people who have no idea what their talking about. There's still no algorithm for content quality.

A man on foot maybe 20 if he's in top shape.

I disagree entirely. An average person walks at about 4 miles per hour. Right now, you're saying that unless you're in good health, you can't do that for 5 hours a day.
A top athlete just ran 26 miles in 2 hours in the Toronto marathon. People in lesser shape than him routinely do it in less than a day. That's >20% over your rough estimate.
Fully equipped Roman soldiers were expected to march 25 miles a day in full kit (about 50 pounds). This included camping at night and all the other good things soldiers on the move have to do (like being in good enough condition to fight if attacked), as well as the drawback of having to maintain unit integrity, which slows a person down. Scouts moved faster. I would certainly agree that they count as being in top shape, but not necessarily top athletes. Yet they do far more than you expect someone in top shape to do, with equipment about 2000 years out of date.
A good tracker can run down a person on horseback, and that is why. It may take a few days, but it can be done. Horses aren't meant for that kind of work, day in and day out - people are. The fact that the average person can't is an indicator of how much people, including myself, under-utilize their bodies.

Mars is a rusty rock.

Jupiter, on the other hand, is fucking gorgeous.

http://library.thinkquest.org/18652/jupiter_io.jpg

let's spray the bugger with lichen, they seem to survive everywhere

http://library.thinkquest.org/26442/html/life/plant.html

Back holes aren't black -- after Hawking they shine!

either. No free redistribution, derived works, or anything. Just because the source code is available doesn't make something open source.

And only OSI can define what open source is?

• S: (adj) open-source (of or relating to or being computer software for which the source code is freely available)
• "Open source is simply programming code that can be read, viewed, modified, and distributed, by anyone who desires. WordPress is distributed under an open source GNU General Public License (GPL)."
• Open Source: "Software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Open source code evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual programmers as well as very large companies. Some examples of open source initiatives are Linux, Eclipse, Apache, Tomcat web server, Mozilla, and various projects hosted on SourceForge and elsewhere."
• "What is open source, and what is the Open Source Initiative?"

While the term "open source" was coined by the Open Source Initiative source code was open, visible to see, study, and modify as early as the 1960s. The hackers of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT in the '60s was posting their source code on boards for anyone to improve and optimize.

But then again that was before "hackers" was used as a negative word.

Falcon

That right, however research into human hibernation is still being advanced at places like NCSU.

70 years ago the Rabbit plague was in full swing (until the Myxoma Virus was introduced in 1950's). Rabbits combined with overgrazing it amplified El Ninyos drying effect on Australia (Learning from history: land and pasture degradation episodes in Australiaâ(TM)s rangelands).

Today due to climate changes effects on the ocean currents, El Ninyo could quite possibly become permanent rather than a periodic event - which if happens, will freeze eastern Australia in a permanent drought conditions (and South America in permanent flooding conditions). A bit of drought in half of Australia and a few major floods in South America would be the very least of the worlds worries though... climate change screwing up the ocean current system is implicated in the Anoxic event which eventually led to the death of 90% of life on earth

>Climate change is a farce. im a sydneysider, this is the worst duststorm we've had in 70 years
No worries mate, the planet will be just fine. Nothing we can do to the planet short of complete nuclear Armageddon that Mother earth can't recover from in a few million years. Its not the planet we have to worry about... its our survival on it as a destructive, greedy, self serving species - and that's just a random sampling of our "elected" leaders

Do they even TRY to adjust for the fact that fat people avoid getting health care most of their lives (because they're more likely to get tired of getting harassed by their doctor about their weight every time they go in for even a flu shot), drink more than thin people (getting shit on regularly can have that effect on people), and have crappier jobs than their normal-sized counterparts with the consequent lower incomes and inferior health care (because it's a lot harder to get hired)?

I'm not pretending that obesity has no effect on someone's health. But it just irks the hell out of me that these sensational studies always fail to adjust for these sorts of related factors in favor of the sensational (and grant whoring) headline of "Obesity correlates with such-and-such other calamity." I'm sure you could produce a study arguing that obesity makes you stupid too, by simply failing to adjust for the fact that the obese are often geographically concentrated in areas (like the American South) where public education is shit and poverty is high.

Why don't we just say that fat people are worse than Hitler and be done with it? You know, the way we've already done with anyone who dares smoke anything other than marijuana (which is somehow magically good for you), or who eats meat, or who drives an SUV (which some self-righteous asshole will probably link to sudden infant death syndrome in some future study), or any of the hundred other things that are going to kill us all any day now.

Is it any coincidence that the medical profession was once closely linked to the idea that all illness was caused by immoral behavior?

What do we do with all the nuclear waste produced from fission? The waste products have a half-life of 4.5 billion years and there is no permanent storage location.

I say blast the waste to the sun, but that's rather permanent if we find we can actually do something with the waste.

I thought we had 11 senses... Why do we keep teaching that we have 5!?!?!

As is pretty clear from the wiki link in the parent post, stopping at 11 human senses is about as arbitrary as stopping at 5 human senses.

So how many senses do we have?

You can take a reductionist approach, and count the different type of "sensory receptors" in an organism. Let's define a sensory receptor as a protein on a peripheral neuron that responds to external events. However, this definition leads us to the conclusion that each kind of cone in the retina is a different sense. This implies that vision is 4 senses (3 cone types, and 1 rod type of photoreceptors) and not 1 sense. If we did the same for touch,smell, and the other ' traditional senses' we would arrive at a number over a thousands (Ok... smell is most of that , but even without smell there are many more than 11).

We get into even more trouble if we allow our definition to include changes in the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) caused by external events. For example, inhaling, ingesting, or injecting stuffs leads to changes in varied receptors in the brain. Is this a sense? When you fall down and hit your head, that induced changes in the brain. Is that a sense? When you get an unexpected reward, your brain gives you some dopamine. By this definition you could say that you have a 'dopamine' sense.

The other approach, which might be more intuitive (and is closer to the classic definition), is a systems level approach. We see, we hear, we smell, we touch, we taste. 5 senses. And we feel acceleration, we feel sharp pain, and dull pain, and burning pain, etc. But if these are all senses, why not include the other feelings? Feeling afraid, sad, happy, horny, sneaky, humiliated, disgusted. These feelings can also be caused by external events. In fact, in the mac dictionary, one definition of feeling is "experience a sensation".

There are valid historical reasons why we separate things like vision from things like sadness. But as we learn more about brain and behavior those reasons are fading. So instead of asking how many senses we have, maybe we should be asking what's the rank of human experience?

and yes, IAAN (i am a neuroscientist).

Ok, one study has, in nature, as referenced by a poster above.

But the real point is that it doesn't matter if Britannica is 99% accurate and Wikipedia is 90%. If people learn not to trust wikipedia as the final source for their information, they can be more likely to catch the errors in the 10% than the 1% in Britanica. Or, at least, to catch enough that wikipedia still provides an extremely valuable service.

Authoritative sources have been using that authority to publish misinformation for years. Look at Hearst and the Spanish American War http://library.thinkquest.org/C0111500/spanamer/app.htm , or Hearst and marijuana http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_history_of_marijuana_in_the_United_States#Criminalization_.281900s.29 or Fox News and Obama being muslim... the list goes on. The point is that nothing on wikipedia is going to be so trusted (we hope) for the public in general to use it as a primary source for something more important than slashdot arguments.

It seems to me that you haven't read any papers on breeder technology. Waste from a breeder is not 'hot' for 10,000 years - the point of burning up the long half life actinides is to eliminate them from the waste stream, making what little waste there is very hot for a very short time. That's how radiation works - things are either very hot for a short time or moderately hot for a long time.

You realize that all of the nuclear waste in the US today is stored on-site in casks either _in the open_ or in a shallow pool of water?

I would suggest you read up on modern reactor technology (and existing, proven technology that Clinton canned like the IFR) before you rehash arguments based on information from the 1950's.

I question your unsubstantiated "billions" figure.

The GP was off but not by much.

"It (the first central commercial incandescent electric generating station) provided electricity to one square mile in New York City in 1882. The first day it operated only 52 customers wanted electricity."

ref: http://library.thinkquest.org/6064/history.html

convincing vast majority about useful utility for higher quality of life is not alway about supply and demand or availability of technology.

Trips to the moon? Okay, that worked. What did we get out of that again? Tang?

http://library.thinkquest.org/5218/spinofflist.htm Only Tang, eh?

McDonalds is popular because of consistancy and market penetration combined with geed marketing.

Country Music is popular because it stretches across a broader range of influences. You have blues and bluegrass on one end and pop on the other with combination of everything in the middle. All the other forms of music is severely limited in ranges and style and attract more people because of the influences in the style then genre itself. Someone who listens to bluegrass will likely also listen to pop country too. Someone who listens to light rock will probably not listen to speed metal or death metal. To them, crossing to country is probably more appealing. Anyways, if you can't stand country, it is probably because you haven't heard enough songs across the range (IE, People like the Dixie chicks or kenney Chesney because they are closer to rock country or pop country but they don't like the yodeling works of Jimmie Rodgers. Here are a few pages talking about the differences in styles within the genres.

Of course I sort of feel the same way as you expresses about rap music. But I have to admit, there are some rap songs that I can tollorate and actually like, I just can't stand the others long enough to buy those CDs or listen to the radio stations waiting for the songs.

Ah! Do knots besides the unknot exist (or, depending on how you define "knot", does a knot exist)? Then the answer is in the affirmative.

Particularly, trefoil knot isn't equivalent to the unknot. This is a fairly sophisticated question, thought the answer seems obvious.

The problem with soft-landing heavy objects on Mars is that there's not enough atmosphere for aerobraking and parachutes to do the job, so the approaches used for Earth re-entry won't work. There's too much gravity for landing on rockets. as with lunar landers, without most of the payload being landing fuel. The problem gets harder as the mass goes up. This was realized only about five years ago, to the embarrassment of some within NASA. So there are now various complicated hybrid schemes, like this.

The scheme with the cables does not look promising. Unlike Luna, Mars has winds and weather. This looks like one of the student lander designs from NASA's high school curriculum.

One bad feature of this design is that the actual landing forces have to be taken by the rover's suspension. Previous designs had the rover inside the landing module, not underneath it. That approach uses crushable components (air bags, crushable blocks, collapsible legs, etc.) to cushion the landing. With this "flying crane" approach, the autopilot has to do a really, really smooth landing or the rover will be broken.

I have an axe to grind, no doubt about it. Before I accidentally clicked the wrong button I meant to link:

"Never forget, space flight is COOL!" - http://library.thinkquest.org/TQ0312074/history.htm

I might be misreading here*, but from what I read the carts had 128 bytes of RAM, but the ROMs could have somewhere on the order of 4KB, up to around 35KB with paging/bank switching.

So... yeah, the game had 128 bytes to store stuff once running, but the game CODE itself could be quite a bit bigger, and then burned to ROM.

Or not? I really don't know.

* http://library.thinkquest.org/06aug/01856/pastAtari.htm

I am waiting for the day when neural implants can actually read the human brain, and as such, you can archive experiences to some type of storage medium. I am sure wikipedia has somewhere how much information the human brain processes a second.

I don't know how *accurate* this is, but I ran across this...

Current estimates of brain capacity range from 1 to 1000 terabytes! "Robert Birge (Syracuse University) who studies the storage of data in proteins, estimated in 1996 that the memory capacity of the brain was between one and ten terabytes, with a most likely value of 3 terabytes. Such estimates are generally based on counting neurons and assuming each neuron holds 1 bit. Bear in mind that the brain has better algorithms for compressing certain types of information than computers do."

and this

the processing power of a average brain to be about 100 million MIPS

couldn't find anything on wikipedia though.

GP may not be polite, but he's right. Lichen are the best adapted plants on Antarctica. And Antarctica is the closest Mars like environment you get on Earth, dry and cold. Some Lichens survive there with a few hours photosynthesis per year.

I think it's better to say that it doesn't exist. How do you know it's one of ours and not one of theirs? Why would you want the government to acknowledge it, so your enemies know exactly which satellites are where, at what time, with which capabilities? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Yeah, I'd love transparency, but we've still got enemies out there, and we can't let them know everything that is in our hand. I have nothing against what these guys have done, but the government has no need to comment on it.

Sorry, but you failed. You are taxed. You have a vote. You therefore have representation. If you want a say in where the money goes, vote for individuals who agree with your viewpoint. If no one exists, run for office yourself so you have a say. I don't see what's so difficult about that. You most certainly are not taxed without representation.

What do we expect them to do? Publish when, where, and how each one will be launched, where it is in orbit, and what its function is? Obviously you can't hide a satellite, just like you can't fully hide any military base, but you can conceal the purpose so you don't if it is a laser from sky that can kill a person instantly, or just a decoy satellite that just beeps like sputnik.

Well first they could say:" Yes, they are spy satellites. Of course we have spy satellites. They cost roughly $153 million each, and there are 170 to 190 of them. We would like to keep their capabilities secret." At least then they aren't lieing like little children with stolen chocolate bar. Also then there can be some semblance of accountability. As it stands there is zero accountability. Zero accountability + huge military budget = dictatorship. Dictatorship!!??!! no no no, that's ridiculous: you say. Given the publics disapproval other "secret" government actions, like extraordinary rendition and wiretapping, I would say that most secret programs don't reflect the will of the people at all. Given that if there are in fact 180+ different spy satellites in the sky, then there have been more spy satellite launches than manned NASA missions. I don't think that is an appropriate way to spend my tax dollars, but I gave no way to challenge that spending, even if my Congressional representative wanted to help me, because no one will even admit that these satellites exist. That makes every tax dollar spent on a "secret" project fall into the category of Taxation without Representation.

Nuclear power has something in common with oil and coal, it requires ridged centralized control. That control being supplied by greedy capitalists. Oil and nuclear power are like closed source code, renewable energy like wind, solar, wave and geothermal are like open source code. Which one do you think the greedy capitalists (have been) are going to back?

On the face of it nuclear power looks like a good solution, but reactors have proven to be leaky, are fabulous targets for terrorists and there is no workable, i.e safe and inexpensive, plan for the transportation and long term storage of nuclear waste. Factor in the cost and safety hazards of dealing with nuclear waste should reduce nuclear power to another option and not a hands down favorite.

Are you saying that the text on this page is wrong? Both Chandrasekhar and Oppenheimer have calculated limits on white dward and neutron star formation, respectively, and they did that 70 years ago. Stars with the same properties (such as mass) act the same. Gravity is going to take over at a certain point when the pressure isn't great enough to counteract it. It doesn't matter what else is going on, if the pressure isn't there to counteract gravity and the mass of the star is great enough to produce enough gravity to be a problem (1.4 or 3.2 x solar mass as is listed on that page) then 1 of 2 things happen.

Either the star shrinks to a white dwarf and keeps burning hotter because it is more dense (which is why it is white hot) and thus is capable of fighting off further gravitational collapse until it burns up its last remaining fuel (which occurs faster now because it is hotter) or it will collapse even further into a neutron star (and a supernova) if its mass was great enough to start out with (3.2 x solar mass). How fast the star is moving and spinning doesn't affect the mass enough to make a difference with regard to the gravity exerted on the star's material (E=mc^2 isn't going to matter because it won't be moving or spinning nearly at all close to the speed of light). Did I use enough ()?

Given the data here it seems that Oppenheimer came up with a value of 3.2 solar masses as the upper limit for a star forming a neutron star. Beyond 3.2 solar masses the star would have a great enough mass to go beyond the stage of the Pauli exclusion principle which applies to neutron stars and go to a black hole instead. Oppenheimer calculated that back in 1939 so I'm not sure why this "sheds new light on the lower limit of a black hole size and the critical threshold at which a star will become a black hole".

Am I missing something? I very well could be but it seems pretty cut and dry.

You're thinking of The Hole Man, by Larry Niven.

I think if we're nitpicking, the BASIC example above is incorrect as well. This page shows an example of a properly coded IF statement (basically, there shouldn't be parentheses nor should there be a $ in FRONT of the variable name).

Basically, the Classic Controller is a recreation of the perfect DPad controller (i.e. the SNES controller) with modern controls tacked on.
The dualshock was also a digital only controller with analog sticks tacked on which explains why the sticks ended up where they did.

For those who haven't seen an orignal digital only playstation controller (many later playstatation packages were bundled with the dualshock instead) you can see a picture at http://library.thinkquest.org/06aug/01856/media/Playstation_Controller.jpg .

It should be exciting to think about the vast majority of humans who need habitats. They will not have $15,000,000, as their average income rounds out around $60 per week. If you want to impress me with the home of the future, describe a place that can provide protection from the elements, including hurricanes, monsoons, etc. Provide warmth, cooling (for food), waste elimination and water filtration (see Dollar a day). All on an average yearly income of less than $3200 Per Capita Income

We have a lot of intelligent people in the world looking to make good things great while the vast, vast, majority of people are just looking to make horrible, merely bad.

http://library.thinkquest.org/23062/pi.html

If anyone wants to know how to do this for themselves (well, assuming you can find all the components), here are some instructions.

This subject is actually quite up my alley. Siemens Medical Solutions are offering a combined proton and carbon therapy facility. They use a synchrotron based accelerator that can accelerate protons and carbon (and also oxygen). The accelerator part is made by the Danish company Danfysik - where I'm employed as an accelerator physicist - based on a heavily modified version of the Heidelberger Ionenstrahl-Therapie (HIT) facility.

Most proton therapy machines are cyclotron based, making them cheaper than synchrotron based accelerators. However, they cannot produce beams of different energies (corresponding to different penetration depths), and one has to use energy degraders to obtain lower energies, which unfortunately also degrades the beam quality (increases its emittance).

Being a physicist and not a medical doctor this is not my area of expertise, but as I see it carbon is increasingly interesting and believed more effective than protons because the mean free path for carbon is around the distance between the two DNA spirals increasing the likelihood of a double-strand break - almost certainly killing the cancer cell.