To their credit, the movie's approach was vastly more realistic than the approach in the book, using natural light rather than room light, and adding a grow tent so that the moisture doesn't condense in every last nook in the electronics systems and kill him, rather than peacefully "raining down" as in the book (it's amazing how much moisture growing even just a few square meters of plants pumps into a room... I remember being confused why the breaker to my bathroom would immediately throw whenever I flipped it, until a couple weeks later the light fixture fell to the floor and smashed into bits due to the weight of all of the water it had collected)
MST3K-level BS on every page, but still, let's keep calling it "hard" science fiction because the author constantly spouted calculations - even though almost every last one was done wrong and spoke to a significant lack of understand of even the basics of the topics he was writing about.
Martian regolith contains perchlorates. It's toxic. We're not talking about nutrient levels. It's up to 2% by mass perchlorate ion. Perchlorates are rocket fuel. Literally, they've actually considered harvesting them to make propellant on Mars. They're also quite toxic, impeding thyroid function at a couple dozen parts per million quantity in water. They're toxic to plants too.
You can't just, like in the book, take some martian regolith, take some manure, sprinkle on some dirt for bacteria (which was BTW a pointless step given the crop choice and the bacteria already present in the manure), mix it all together and call it a growth medium. First you have to bake the regolith to break down the perchlorates. Then you have to rinse it to remove the extra salts. Then if you have a reverse osmosis system you could add the water back in. There's still no guarantees then that it'd be fertile/have all of the needed nutrients in approximately the right ratios, but at least it's not guaranteed to be a health hazard to both you and your plants.
I hear programmers complain all the time when programming is represented horribly in movies. Honestly, I think he was incredibly nice about the book's terrible portrayal of botany. The book's description of the growing of caloric crops indoors is the botanical equivalent of someone writing a programmer into a book like:
Haxx0r wandered around the code, scanning the macros with his VR headset. A greenish slime dripped off of the prime for-loop. "Now where did that come from... " he pondered. Suddenly a loud wail sounded out behind him - he whirled around in time to see the Shellshocker Bug leaping off of the ceiling toward his head. "BAM! BAM! BAM!" - the shots rang out from Haxx0r's debugging pixel, and the bug dropped to the ground wriggling. "Excellent," he said wryly, ".. now gotta just to clean up this while loop and then the variables should really start compiling!"
You sound just like your typical computer illiterate person getting mad when listening to a programmer complain that the programming in a TV show is nonsense. "What is it with you, why do you have to comment about how your job is represented in movies or TV series?"
It's scientifically accurate in that "it's possible to grow plants on Mars, just not in the way done in the movie and certainly not in the way done in the book".
As for the way done in the movie:
But those nitpicking details could be crucial in real life.
The biggest problem, he said, is that Mars is about 1.5 times farther from the sun than the Earth is, and only gets about 60 percent of the light. This means that plants on Mars would grow at about 60 percent of the rate of Earth plants, even when exposed to full Mars light. Watney's habitat was designed to block radiation, which would lower the light levels even more.
"How would he get enough light for his plants? He didn't go into that. But plants need bright, bright light," Bugbee said. "We normally use a lot of solar panels and a lot of electric lights, but one of the things we're working on now is fiber optics: big, concentrating mirrors and fiber optics to bring that bright light in to grow plants."
Not to mention that the room, as shown in the movie, can easily be calculated to be significantly too small even if it was getting Earth light. But at least the situation in the movie (one order of magnitude too little energy to sustain a person) is better than in the book where potatoes are being grown on normal room lights;) Most people don't realize how much vastly dimmer it is, from an energy perspective, inside than outside - our eyes compensate for it, otherwise you wouldn't be able to see details in bright areas and dim areas at once. But that little "nitpicking detail" - 2-4 orders of magnitude too little light, give or take - is indeed critical to plants growing, and especially to them producing energy to store that humans can eat.
Had Weir had any experience whatsoever with growing caloric plants indoors, he would have realized this and there are many things he could have done in his design to ensure that the plants would get enough sun. The best option is exactly what the actual botanist above mentions: solar concentrators. A solar thermal power plant is a perfectly plausible way to generate electricity on Mars and Watney - had he been given a solar thermal farm and habitat with lots of transparent plastic - could have redirected heliostats to reflect large amounts of light into the habitat and stripped off insulation (adding it back on every night) to compensate for the dramatically increased heat load. That would have thus avoided the solar to electricity losses and the electricity to light losses, giving an order of magnitude more power, as well as avoiding the need to have quantities of lights onboard hundreds of times brighter (and correspondingly more power-hungry) than you actually would ever find. And it's plausible he could have taken existing heliostats and aluminum scrap and significantly boosted their parabolic area and thus light output (assuming the drive mechanism could take the additional load or he could modify it to).
But, that's not how it went.
There's tons of other things that would have killed the plants grown as described in the book (getting caloric crops to grow right in sealed spaces indoors is difficult even in controlled circumstances, there's such a huge range of things that can suddenly and dramatically wipe them out - which is why, as mentioned in TFA, NASA has a whole department researching the topic to try to create the controlled conditions to prevent this), but let's just stick to the most fundamental aspects here for now. The light was, pardon the pun, the most glaring problem.;)
Huh? Russia has engaged in plenty of secret wars and occupations in the past "since decades", including some really brutal slaughters (see Grozny for an example, that's how Russia puts down a rebellion). And the US and Israel "sponsored and trained ISIS" (Daesh)? The US and Israel are actively fighting Daesh (the former being among the most active entities in the world fighting them). The US has never supported Daesh - they're even giving pretty much a free pass to al-Qaeda right now (al-Nusra in Syria) because even al-Qaeda is fighting Daesh (when even al-Qaeda thinks you're too radical, you're seriously messed up). Even before the US started actively fighting Daesh they were helping the Iraqi military in their efforts to fight them.
My attitude as well. The US may sometimes come across as an evil overlord, but I'd pick that evil overlord over its evil overlord competition - even though I'd prefer a non-evil overlord, or better, no overlord at all;)
$300m per cable which Russia could probably cut for a few hundred thousand USD per cable of amortized ship construction/operating costs - yeah, what a winning bet you've got there.
Seriously, you want to spend 10% of the US military's entire budget on one line item?
Then again, maybe I'm misunderstanding. Perhaps they're multiply 68*2,5 and getting $170B and rounding that to $160B? But the cost of the tunnels isn't $68B, that's the cost of the entire project - even things like building the trains are included in that figure. Yet they're acting like purely tunnels are to blame.
New York's 11-mile East Side Access tunnel project is 14 years late and about 2.5x its original budget. If California's 72 miles of tunnels (twin tunnels of 36 miles) go like New York's, that would be over US$160B spent,
This is absurd (and not an argument presented in the article, because the author isn't a moron). You can't just act like all tunnel building costs are the same per mile, they vary by orders of magnitude. The East Side Access project is to go through some of the most valuable, infrastructure-heavy, densely populated real estate in the US and to merge into Grand Central Terminal.
BUK is a surface to air system. It's mobile (vehicle mounted) rather than fixed, but that's usually the case these days. What it isn't is a MANPAD.
The US stopped giving anti-air missiles to rebel groups after the late 80s, after proliferation concerns were raised about the Stingers in Afghanistan. Nowadays the US on a rather anti-MANPAD crusade, including a MANPAD buyback program that buys MANPADs from anywhere, no questions asked, spending a small fortune ($40M/year) to try to get them off the black market.
Honestly, I think the US has gone a bit overboard in its anti-MANPAD obsession. They let Syria get flooded with TOWs in batches of 250-500 with a potential supply of over 13.000 (the amount that they sold to Saudi Arabia for that purpose), but finds the concept of a single MANPAD - which requires that you smuggle it to near the airport if you want to hit a commercial plane - unthinkable. A TOW can of course take out a passenger train, a truck carrying hazardous waste, attack nuclear facilities, hit a plane on the ground, etc. But the US has this weird distinction of "MANPADs = Unthinkable, Antitank = Use as many as you need". That's not to say that the TOWs are unrestricted - they have a pretty good policy for their distribution, requiring returning the spent tubes and filming the attacks and a bunch of other things; of the thousands that have been sent only 2-4 are believed to have been captured by al-Nusra, who's already used some if not all of them. But still...
And with the anti-MANPAD crusade, you'd think that they'd have poured more money into anti-proliferation countermeasures. Yet you don't see that hardly at all. In fact, it looks like the next version of the Grom is going to be the first anti-proliferation MANPAD, and that's Polish. And sometimes people talk about "ways anti-proliferation measures could be cheated", but these arguments are usually based around really dumb implementations of anti-proliferation measures. They don't have to be limited to electronic lockout mechanisms, you can have the missiles additionally be literally designed to degrade, with a "guaranteed to still work" time of X months and a "guaranteed to not work" time of Y months. Degradation isn't some unusual thing, it's much harder to *stop* than to cause. Replace for example gold interconnects on the circuitboards with sulfrous silver, or even calcium metal. Great conductor in the beginning, but it'll oxidize fast, especially if moist. Seal it in a casing with silica gel to slow the rate of decay to the desired length. Anyone opening the casing would only make it degrade even faster. Have the explosives and propellant similarly degrade so that for X months they're still fine, but after Y months they're no longer useful. You could even have the casing rust - and probably save yourself money in the process.
You can easily make it to the point where it'd be far, far easier to make a new MANPAD than to fix the degrading one.
Okay, so what's the name of the grid (square or rectangular) of steel bar-like things that I continually see whenever they're redoing the roads and sidewalks downtown if not "rebar"? Do you call that "mesh"?
Regardless, conductive and ferromagnetic. Just a much smaller target than a continuous plate.
Doesn't even seem that well designed. If you want something that even approaches the dexterity a person gets on a skateboard you can't just drift like a hovercraft. If a person leans to the side it should resist drifting to the opposite side (as if wheels were gripping in). Otherwise it's like trying to balance on a tightrope. Also, the hovering elements should be independently pivoted - otherwise, with such a low clearance, it's going to be stuck to perfectly flat surfaces, limiting the potential fun (over the fact that you can only use it atop metal).
Hmm, now that got me wondering... I almost wonder if it would be possible to design a system to hover off of the rebar embedded in concrete - sidewalks, streets, interior spaces, etc. That could vastly extend the amount of surfaces you could use it on. Obviously not all rebar is spaced evenly, but...
If you didn't notice that neither of your articles had to do with earthquakes, or that the topic under discussion here is earthquakes, then you're the one who needs coffee.
Their latest propaganda line by the Russians is "the report is flawed, as the Russian findings were not taken into account" and that Russia was "kept out of the loop of the investigation". Which, of course, is total BS.
It was not Russia who shot down MH17, it was rebels from Ukraine which were armed by Russia.
Because random untrained individuals can operate a SAM site?
If you count that as Russia, than considering the US have armed rebels pretty much everywhere around the world, I'm pretty sure a good number of the commercial airplanes which were shot down could be attributed to the US.
Since when does the US give SAM sites to random rebel groups? The US doesn't even give (and actively blocks attempts to give) even groups it supports MANPADs, let alone SAM sites. The latter poses a vastly greater threat to commercial airliners - MANPADs can only hit them shortly after takeoff or shortly before landing, while SAM sites can hit them during cruise phase. They're also far more complicated systems and require a lot more training.
I'd also like to remind you that the US also directly shot a commercial airplane (Iran air flight 655), killing 290 civilians. Finally, Ukraine also shot a Russian commercial aircraft in 2001.
So peacetime accidents are equivalent to pumping military hardware and troops into a neighboring country to try to rip off part of it and shooting at anything that flies without warning civil aviation that you're supplying hardware that can shoot their planes down? And FYI, Russia initially tried to hide the fact that Ukraine had accidentally shot down Siberia Airlines Flight 1812, because they were actively propping up Ukraine's then government, claiming that it was impossible for the S200 to overshoot by 250 kilometers. And in the former case the US military made 10 attempts to hail Flight 655, three of which it received, and none of which it responded to.
In the former case, Ukraine initially denied its culpability, but later admitted it. In the latter case, the US admitted its involvement pretty much immediately. Russia to this date continues to deny, obfuscate, and apparently, hack too to try to avoid culpability.
And by the way, the US certainly played an important role in the current Ukrainian situation. The ones who are in power right now in Ukraine had support from the US and Europe.
Oh yes, the US clearly cares so tremendously much for Ukraine - that's why they won't even toss them a single Javelin, let alone heavy hardware, to help them defend their country, right? Clearly Russia had no choice but to flood the country with troops and vast amounts of heavy military hardware!
Why did you include two links neither of which have to do with earthquakes?
Anyway, this isn't entirely accurate:
This raises major questions for the legality of fracking, which has been linked to the increased number of earthquakes striking Oklahoma over the past decade.
It's actually wastewater injection that's tied to increasing numbers of earthquakes. Now, fracking often uses wastewater injection. But other types of oil production sometimes do as well, and fracking doesn't always involve it. It's important to keep clear on just what the problem is.
Indeed. I can't write about places where I live or the names of some people I know for example because the characters disappear. It's not that Slashdot gives a warning that they're not allowed - they just silently vanish, so even if you know about Slashdot's "appetite", it's easy to forget / screw up. Yet it's only *some* characters that do that. I can't write a thorn but I can write an eth.... why exactly? And I can't tell you how many times I've written exponents (which my keyboard automatically translates to exponent unicode characters) to have them disappear and then have people make fun of me for using the wrong units - for example, I write "10000 m^3/s" and it comes out "10000 m/s".
I know most Americans couldn't give a rat's arse about unicode, but for people elsewhere in the world, it really matters - even if we're writing in English.
Time-delayed or rarely-occurring "evil" can often be better. There's a number of examples here, although some would be harder to sneak past code review than others. Unless your code review system is lax, or (best) if you have write access to the repository. But some of the aforementioned ideas (or variants thereof) would be just brilliantly evil, to the point that the code works fine when you leave, but say three months later it starts rarely breaking at random times and locations, and the "code plague" just gets more and more common with time.
One case where Mimic could sneak past the compiler (and code review) but still cause problems would be inside strings. For example, there's a number of characters that render like spaces but are actually multibyte unicode characters. Same with dashes, underscores, and many other characters. Using them would cause the length of the string to not be what the user thinks it is. And string operations could accidentally break up the unicode characters. Such errors could slip code review by and cause random inexplicable runtime errors for quite some time. And the nice thing about those kinds of errors are that you can chock them up to accidents. "Oh, I'm so sorry! I was just copying some code off the net, the character must have gotten mucked up..."
... and many more will, this is an old design, already in use.
Personally my favorite solar thermal concept is the compact linear fresnel reflector. They're much more dense (land area used per unit power generated) than pretty much all other solar tracking methods. Also, they only require single-axis tracking in long linear rows - but unlike other single-axis tracking methods like parabolic troughs, you don't need a receiver (heat pipe) running through the middle of every reflector; a reflector is *just* a reflector. The alternation of directions in which light gets reflected reduces blocking between reflectors, and thus increases how close you can space them. And the high density means less distance for the hot water to flow, and thus less heat loss, further increasing the power generation per unit area.
The amount of dry air you'd need is unthinkably large, unfortunately. There have been some proposals for controlling hurricanes, mind you. One involves dyeing the surface of the ocean in the path of a hurricane, creating locally hotter patches in a way that creates shear or other negative effects. Another is large-scale vortex generators to create competing centers to eat away at the eye. There's quite a few proposals being worked on out there in theory.
Slashdot Mirror
To their credit, the movie's approach was vastly more realistic than the approach in the book, using natural light rather than room light, and adding a grow tent so that the moisture doesn't condense in every last nook in the electronics systems and kill him, rather than peacefully "raining down" as in the book (it's amazing how much moisture growing even just a few square meters of plants pumps into a room... I remember being confused why the breaker to my bathroom would immediately throw whenever I flipped it, until a couple weeks later the light fixture fell to the floor and smashed into bits due to the weight of all of the water it had collected)
MST3K-level BS on every page, but still, let's keep calling it "hard" science fiction because the author constantly spouted calculations - even though almost every last one was done wrong and spoke to a significant lack of understand of even the basics of the topics he was writing about.
It's like you didn't even listen to the parent.
Martian regolith contains perchlorates. It's toxic. We're not talking about nutrient levels. It's up to 2% by mass perchlorate ion. Perchlorates are rocket fuel. Literally, they've actually considered harvesting them to make propellant on Mars. They're also quite toxic, impeding thyroid function at a couple dozen parts per million quantity in water. They're toxic to plants too.
You can't just, like in the book, take some martian regolith, take some manure, sprinkle on some dirt for bacteria (which was BTW a pointless step given the crop choice and the bacteria already present in the manure), mix it all together and call it a growth medium. First you have to bake the regolith to break down the perchlorates. Then you have to rinse it to remove the extra salts. Then if you have a reverse osmosis system you could add the water back in. There's still no guarantees then that it'd be fertile/have all of the needed nutrients in approximately the right ratios, but at least it's not guaranteed to be a health hazard to both you and your plants.
I hear programmers complain all the time when programming is represented horribly in movies. Honestly, I think he was incredibly nice about the book's terrible portrayal of botany. The book's description of the growing of caloric crops indoors is the botanical equivalent of someone writing a programmer into a book like:
You sound just like your typical computer illiterate person getting mad when listening to a programmer complain that the programming in a TV show is nonsense. "What is it with you, why do you have to comment about how your job is represented in movies or TV series?"
It's scientifically accurate in that "it's possible to grow plants on Mars, just not in the way done in the movie and certainly not in the way done in the book".
As for the way done in the movie:
Not to mention that the room, as shown in the movie, can easily be calculated to be significantly too small even if it was getting Earth light. But at least the situation in the movie (one order of magnitude too little energy to sustain a person) is better than in the book where potatoes are being grown on normal room lights ;) Most people don't realize how much vastly dimmer it is, from an energy perspective, inside than outside - our eyes compensate for it, otherwise you wouldn't be able to see details in bright areas and dim areas at once. But that little "nitpicking detail" - 2-4 orders of magnitude too little light, give or take - is indeed critical to plants growing, and especially to them producing energy to store that humans can eat.
Had Weir had any experience whatsoever with growing caloric plants indoors, he would have realized this and there are many things he could have done in his design to ensure that the plants would get enough sun. The best option is exactly what the actual botanist above mentions: solar concentrators. A solar thermal power plant is a perfectly plausible way to generate electricity on Mars and Watney - had he been given a solar thermal farm and habitat with lots of transparent plastic - could have redirected heliostats to reflect large amounts of light into the habitat and stripped off insulation (adding it back on every night) to compensate for the dramatically increased heat load. That would have thus avoided the solar to electricity losses and the electricity to light losses, giving an order of magnitude more power, as well as avoiding the need to have quantities of lights onboard hundreds of times brighter (and correspondingly more power-hungry) than you actually would ever find. And it's plausible he could have taken existing heliostats and aluminum scrap and significantly boosted their parabolic area and thus light output (assuming the drive mechanism could take the additional load or he could modify it to).
But, that's not how it went.
There's tons of other things that would have killed the plants grown as described in the book (getting caloric crops to grow right in sealed spaces indoors is difficult even in controlled circumstances, there's such a huge range of things that can suddenly and dramatically wipe them out - which is why, as mentioned in TFA, NASA has a whole department researching the topic to try to create the controlled conditions to prevent this), but let's just stick to the most fundamental aspects here for now. The light was, pardon the pun, the most glaring problem. ;)
Huh? Russia has engaged in plenty of secret wars and occupations in the past "since decades", including some really brutal slaughters (see Grozny for an example, that's how Russia puts down a rebellion). And the US and Israel "sponsored and trained ISIS" (Daesh)? The US and Israel are actively fighting Daesh (the former being among the most active entities in the world fighting them). The US has never supported Daesh - they're even giving pretty much a free pass to al-Qaeda right now (al-Nusra in Syria) because even al-Qaeda is fighting Daesh (when even al-Qaeda thinks you're too radical, you're seriously messed up). Even before the US started actively fighting Daesh they were helping the Iraqi military in their efforts to fight them.
My attitude as well. The US may sometimes come across as an evil overlord, but I'd pick that evil overlord over its evil overlord competition - even though I'd prefer a non-evil overlord, or better, no overlord at all ;)
It's started on one side. The other side still largely has its eyes closed and its fingers in its ears, chanting "la la la, I can't hear you!"
He's not a troll, he's a Likho. Putin would never resort to using inferior western mythological creatures!
$300m per cable which Russia could probably cut for a few hundred thousand USD per cable of amortized ship construction/operating costs - yeah, what a winning bet you've got there.
Seriously, you want to spend 10% of the US military's entire budget on one line item?
Then again, maybe I'm misunderstanding. Perhaps they're multiply 68*2,5 and getting $170B and rounding that to $160B? But the cost of the tunnels isn't $68B, that's the cost of the entire project - even things like building the trains are included in that figure. Yet they're acting like purely tunnels are to blame.
This is absurd (and not an argument presented in the article, because the author isn't a moron). You can't just act like all tunnel building costs are the same per mile, they vary by orders of magnitude. The East Side Access project is to go through some of the most valuable, infrastructure-heavy, densely populated real estate in the US and to merge into Grand Central Terminal.
Nope, Reykjavík.
Here's what it looks like. Or this or this. Roads like this.
BUK is a surface to air system. It's mobile (vehicle mounted) rather than fixed, but that's usually the case these days. What it isn't is a MANPAD.
The US stopped giving anti-air missiles to rebel groups after the late 80s, after proliferation concerns were raised about the Stingers in Afghanistan. Nowadays the US on a rather anti-MANPAD crusade, including a MANPAD buyback program that buys MANPADs from anywhere, no questions asked, spending a small fortune ($40M/year) to try to get them off the black market.
Honestly, I think the US has gone a bit overboard in its anti-MANPAD obsession. They let Syria get flooded with TOWs in batches of 250-500 with a potential supply of over 13.000 (the amount that they sold to Saudi Arabia for that purpose), but finds the concept of a single MANPAD - which requires that you smuggle it to near the airport if you want to hit a commercial plane - unthinkable. A TOW can of course take out a passenger train, a truck carrying hazardous waste, attack nuclear facilities, hit a plane on the ground, etc. But the US has this weird distinction of "MANPADs = Unthinkable, Antitank = Use as many as you need". That's not to say that the TOWs are unrestricted - they have a pretty good policy for their distribution, requiring returning the spent tubes and filming the attacks and a bunch of other things; of the thousands that have been sent only 2-4 are believed to have been captured by al-Nusra, who's already used some if not all of them. But still...
And with the anti-MANPAD crusade, you'd think that they'd have poured more money into anti-proliferation countermeasures. Yet you don't see that hardly at all. In fact, it looks like the next version of the Grom is going to be the first anti-proliferation MANPAD, and that's Polish. And sometimes people talk about "ways anti-proliferation measures could be cheated", but these arguments are usually based around really dumb implementations of anti-proliferation measures. They don't have to be limited to electronic lockout mechanisms, you can have the missiles additionally be literally designed to degrade, with a "guaranteed to still work" time of X months and a "guaranteed to not work" time of Y months. Degradation isn't some unusual thing, it's much harder to *stop* than to cause. Replace for example gold interconnects on the circuitboards with sulfrous silver, or even calcium metal. Great conductor in the beginning, but it'll oxidize fast, especially if moist. Seal it in a casing with silica gel to slow the rate of decay to the desired length. Anyone opening the casing would only make it degrade even faster. Have the explosives and propellant similarly degrade so that for X months they're still fine, but after Y months they're no longer useful. You could even have the casing rust - and probably save yourself money in the process.
You can easily make it to the point where it'd be far, far easier to make a new MANPAD than to fix the degrading one.
Okay, so what's the name of the grid (square or rectangular) of steel bar-like things that I continually see whenever they're redoing the roads and sidewalks downtown if not "rebar"? Do you call that "mesh"?
Regardless, conductive and ferromagnetic. Just a much smaller target than a continuous plate.
Doesn't even seem that well designed. If you want something that even approaches the dexterity a person gets on a skateboard you can't just drift like a hovercraft. If a person leans to the side it should resist drifting to the opposite side (as if wheels were gripping in). Otherwise it's like trying to balance on a tightrope. Also, the hovering elements should be independently pivoted - otherwise, with such a low clearance, it's going to be stuck to perfectly flat surfaces, limiting the potential fun (over the fact that you can only use it atop metal).
Hmm, now that got me wondering... I almost wonder if it would be possible to design a system to hover off of the rebar embedded in concrete - sidewalks, streets, interior spaces, etc. That could vastly extend the amount of surfaces you could use it on. Obviously not all rebar is spaced evenly, but...
If you didn't notice that neither of your articles had to do with earthquakes, or that the topic under discussion here is earthquakes, then you're the one who needs coffee.
Their latest propaganda line by the Russians is "the report is flawed, as the Russian findings were not taken into account" and that Russia was "kept out of the loop of the investigation". Which, of course, is total BS.
Because random untrained individuals can operate a SAM site?
Since when does the US give SAM sites to random rebel groups? The US doesn't even give (and actively blocks attempts to give) even groups it supports MANPADs, let alone SAM sites. The latter poses a vastly greater threat to commercial airliners - MANPADs can only hit them shortly after takeoff or shortly before landing, while SAM sites can hit them during cruise phase. They're also far more complicated systems and require a lot more training.
So peacetime accidents are equivalent to pumping military hardware and troops into a neighboring country to try to rip off part of it and shooting at anything that flies without warning civil aviation that you're supplying hardware that can shoot their planes down? And FYI, Russia initially tried to hide the fact that Ukraine had accidentally shot down Siberia Airlines Flight 1812, because they were actively propping up Ukraine's then government, claiming that it was impossible for the S200 to overshoot by 250 kilometers. And in the former case the US military made 10 attempts to hail Flight 655, three of which it received, and none of which it responded to.
In the former case, Ukraine initially denied its culpability, but later admitted it. In the latter case, the US admitted its involvement pretty much immediately. Russia to this date continues to deny, obfuscate, and apparently, hack too to try to avoid culpability.
Oh yes, the US clearly cares so tremendously much for Ukraine - that's why they won't even toss them a single Javelin, let alone heavy hardware, to help them defend their country, right? Clearly Russia had no choice but to flood the country with troops and vast amounts of heavy military hardware!
Why did you include two links neither of which have to do with earthquakes?
Anyway, this isn't entirely accurate:
It's actually wastewater injection that's tied to increasing numbers of earthquakes. Now, fracking often uses wastewater injection. But other types of oil production sometimes do as well, and fracking doesn't always involve it. It's important to keep clear on just what the problem is.
Indeed. I can't write about places where I live or the names of some people I know for example because the characters disappear. It's not that Slashdot gives a warning that they're not allowed - they just silently vanish, so even if you know about Slashdot's "appetite", it's easy to forget / screw up. Yet it's only *some* characters that do that. I can't write a thorn but I can write an eth.... why exactly? And I can't tell you how many times I've written exponents (which my keyboard automatically translates to exponent unicode characters) to have them disappear and then have people make fun of me for using the wrong units - for example, I write "10000 m^3/s" and it comes out "10000 m/s".
I know most Americans couldn't give a rat's arse about unicode, but for people elsewhere in the world, it really matters - even if we're writing in English.
Time-delayed or rarely-occurring "evil" can often be better. There's a number of examples here, although some would be harder to sneak past code review than others. Unless your code review system is lax, or (best) if you have write access to the repository. But some of the aforementioned ideas (or variants thereof) would be just brilliantly evil, to the point that the code works fine when you leave, but say three months later it starts rarely breaking at random times and locations, and the "code plague" just gets more and more common with time.
One case where Mimic could sneak past the compiler (and code review) but still cause problems would be inside strings. For example, there's a number of characters that render like spaces but are actually multibyte unicode characters. Same with dashes, underscores, and many other characters. Using them would cause the length of the string to not be what the user thinks it is. And string operations could accidentally break up the unicode characters. Such errors could slip code review by and cause random inexplicable runtime errors for quite some time. And the nice thing about those kinds of errors are that you can chock them up to accidents. "Oh, I'm so sorry! I was just copying some code off the net, the character must have gotten mucked up..."
... and many more will, this is an old design, already in use.
Personally my favorite solar thermal concept is the compact linear fresnel reflector. They're much more dense (land area used per unit power generated) than pretty much all other solar tracking methods. Also, they only require single-axis tracking in long linear rows - but unlike other single-axis tracking methods like parabolic troughs, you don't need a receiver (heat pipe) running through the middle of every reflector; a reflector is *just* a reflector. The alternation of directions in which light gets reflected reduces blocking between reflectors, and thus increases how close you can space them. And the high density means less distance for the hot water to flow, and thus less heat loss, further increasing the power generation per unit area.
200-165=50?
The amount of dry air you'd need is unthinkably large, unfortunately. There have been some proposals for controlling hurricanes, mind you. One involves dyeing the surface of the ocean in the path of a hurricane, creating locally hotter patches in a way that creates shear or other negative effects. Another is large-scale vortex generators to create competing centers to eat away at the eye. There's quite a few proposals being worked on out there in theory.