Solar thermal still makes sense where the aim is to generate heat, rather than electricity. As a method of heating water (either for domestic or industrial purposes) it will always be tough to beat, boasting as it does a zero wastage conversion rate (because there is no conversion- you produce the desired end product straight away).
An awful lot of energy is expended to produce heating, so cutting out the electrical middle-man is no bad thing. There is also no reason why you can't distribute hot water via pipes from a central solar heating installation.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this would only "prove" the existence of (that variety of) multiverse in a very small subset of universes.
So, let's say I try to poison myself with a pill from a bottle containing 99 cyanide pills and 1 sugar pill. There is a 99% chance I'll die, and a 1% chance I'll live. So in 1% of all universes, I live. I repeat the expriement multiple times, until only 1 in 1 million universes has a surviving me in. That means that in 0.0001% of universes, a very smug version of me is winning a Nobel prize for proving the existence of the multiverse. In 99.9999% of universes, I am dead and nothing has been proven except that I really shouldn't be allowed access to the lab's supply of cyanide pills.
Both wine and "ale" beers are made with saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast. Although there are different strands preferred for different styles of wine and beer, the differences shouldn't be too over the top. You're not going to end up with a fine best bitter with champagne yeast, nor are you going to get a competition-standard claret with ale yeast- but the results will be drinkable and tasty enough. See, for example, "champale" (beer brewed with champagne yeast which has been sold commercially).
Lager is made with a different species of yeast (s. carlsbergensis). So using a wine yeast is never likely to make a decent approximation of a lager.
Source: Have been making wines and beers for a decade, including many experimental batches as per the above.
As others have pointed out, you wouldn't need to describe a human to a molecular level. You could create a biological clone using just the DNA- the human genome is some 24 gigabits (3 gigabytes?). That'd be something like "a few hours" to transfer over a standard home internet connection. Arguably, there are big chunks of that genome which will be common across individuals, so you wouldn't even need to transmit the whole thing every time.
Transferring a human's consciousness would be more difficult. As far as I'm aware, there are no serious estimates as to how "big", in bits/bytes terms, the human consciousness might be. Even if you could scan one, and it was a reasonable size for transmission, I can't even imagine how you'd go about "implanting it" into another human body (e.g. a clone). Without that, there's no "I'll just download into a Martian clone and have an explore".
We have perhaps 100 trillion years to fill before the stars have gone out. The universe is only 13.5 billion years old. That means we are so far only 0.0135% of the way into the lifespan of the universe, with 99.9965% left to go.
Growing clones is hardly magic (and that is all "printing humans" means in this context). We can already do it with provisos (i.e., with the right embryonic cells and so forth)- there's no reason to assume we won't learn better methods as biology progresses. Animals grow new animals in their wombs out of nothing but carbon and nutrients all the time- can't be impossible to replicate.
The "magic" bit is transferring consciousness of one human to another human body. Nobody has the foggiest how that would work. But then, if all you wanted was a populated colony, who said you even need to do that? Grow the little humans to adulthood and raise them using robotic machines, and voila- one new colony, without the hassle of transporting 100's of humans 10's of light-years through space.
It is disingenuous to count XP's support period from its first release date, considering that each Service Pack represented as big a change to the OS as each Ubuntu release (for example).
Support for original XP (without a Service Pack) ended in 2005- only 4 years supported. The last Service Pack, SP3, was released in 2008- giving it a respectable 6 years supported. If XP had exited support when it was scheduled to (2012- it was only extended due to a Microsoft product-line-up cockup at the hight of the netbook craze), it would have had 4 years in support too- less than any of the others you named.
Even if you stubbornly disagree with what I'm saying about SPs and wish to count it all the way from SP0-SP3 end of support, might I also reiterate above that support was only extended at the last minute due to a Microsoft cockup- namely, that Vista was wildly unsuited to the then very popular netbooks. The standard offer from Microsoft is 10 years support (which is what you might reasonably expect to receive from Windows 8). This is the same as Red Hat, and comparable with other Enterprise-market OSs.
Morally, no. Legally, yeah it's still wrong. There are pretty strict laws against vigilantism. At its simplest, you've got the principal of "innocence until proven guilty" to contend with- you THINK he did it, in fact you think you KNOW he did it, but no court has been persuaded of that fact. You're pretty damned sure that the laptop you took is yours (pretty bloody damned sure- they're easily identifiable items)- but unless you've persuaded a court that it's yours, you're still in the wrong.
Debatable, but I would bet the long-term money on LibreOffice. Why? Licensing. LO is under the LGPL, while OO is under the APL. LO is able to reuse any OO code that they like, nicking any cool new features Apache develop. OO cannot- the LGPL will not allow it. So if OO develop any cool new features or improvements, they'll turn up in LO one release later. If LO develop any cool features or improvements of their own, it remains an LO exclusive.
Cost of a PC monitor = the cost of a TV to use with a console. Do you count the cost of the £500 TV in your lounge when you count the cost of your PS4? In my case, I've had the same two monitors (dual screen) hooked up to my PC for around than 10 years now- and one of them was free second hand in the first place. My lounge TV, on the other hand, I chose specifically and spent good money on not so long ago.
Cost of a router applies equally to both console and PC. Both of them need to connect to the internet, and both of them will have the same "advantage" in reduced latencies, if you're so inclined.
So the cost of my PC which could be fairly compared to a console would be- the PC itself and all internals came to around £500. The mouse was £50, but it is getting towards 10 years old now (was a good Logitech MX518, and is still going strong). The headphones were about £7.50. I own a joystick, and although I hardly use it I'll include the cost- it was around £25, bought in an offer along with X-Wing Alliance back in 2000 or so (Microsoft Sidewinder, still works perfectly). Keyboard came bundled free with the PC case (as did a decent mouse which I don't use). So total cost- perhaps £580 or so, ignoring the fact that several peripherals have survived multiple PCs.
More expensive than a console with a single controller, sure. But not exactly breaking the flipping bank.
People say that Slashdot has fallen a long way...but that's just sad. A thread about a AAA game which is being released on Linux- with no mention in TFS, nor the chosen TFA, and only a tiny comment batch discussing it.
Even Reddit managed better coverage of the fact this is a Linux game than Slashdot. If I was just relying on Slashdot for my news, I wouldn't even have known this WAS a Linux game.
I used to have relatives who owned a pig farm. Boiling the slops was a standard part of their routine.
They actually used to have arrangements with all of the local pubs and restaurants, which every day would collect all of the plate scrapings, left overs and kitchen offcuts into slop buckets. Every morning my uncle would go around collecting the slop buckets and take them back to the farm, where they would all be emptied into a big vat and boiled for a number of hours. The end result would be a mushy stuff with the texture and smell of vomit, but which would be sterile of any nasties that could harm the pigs. The pigs loved the stuff. Filthy buggers.
Chucking a few jars of peanut putter into the mix every day would have been easy enough.
Of course that wouldn't even be strictly necessary, seeing as the manufacturer of the peanut butter seems to be swearing blind that the product is uncontaminated and fit for human consumption. If the farmer were happy with this, they could go nuts and just feed it straight to the pigs.
Then sell it as livestock feed. Pigs eat far worse than peanut butter. Boil it up along with the rest of the slops to kill off any salmonella, and it'll be perfectly safe (if disgusting, from a human point of view).
Still a waste of perfectly good human food, but at least it's better than burying it with the trash.
Seems like it would have been easy enough for their lawyers to draw up a contract to fix this. One which says "Costco is returning full ownership of this product to the manufacturer and is absolved of all responsibility for it's future uses". Then the manufacturer would have been free to resell it (or donate it), and would be fully liable for any risks. It sounds like the supplier is in some financial difficulty, so would have welcomed the chance to relabel and sell it on to a different retailer. Seeing as Costco weren't willing to pay for it, I don't see what objection they should have to that- and it's not like that decision would have any impact on their competition (i.e., it's not like their competitors would have to do without peanut butter if this shipment gets destroyed).
Sounds like corporate apathy to me. It's simply easiest for Costco to destroy a batch that they aren't willing to sell, and they have no motivation to do anything else.
"Travelling fast" is one thing, "travelling fast in such a way as to successfully arrive in orbit of a planet light-years away without missing and getting lost in space" is another, and "travelling fast in such a way as to rendezvous with an impossibly tiny ship halfway into the interstellar void launched centuries ago, slow down enough to dock with it, drastically reconfigure it mid-flight, then speed back up again and still arrive in orbit of a planet light-years away" is still yet a third thing.
You've sort of hit on the problem and solution. What we need is something that is not called a "taxi" for this. Rather than taking the existing taxi system and adding ride sharing, we should supplement taxis with a new form of public transport based on this system. The new system would be somewhere between a bus and a taxi- a medium sized public vehicle (perhaps "minibus" size), but which would be summoned on demand and travel to your chosen destination like a taxi rather than travelling a fixed schedule like a bus.
This would solve both of the obvious problems- the first being that people who order taxis expect a private vehicle taking the shortest trip possiblem and the second being that existing taxi drivers and firms don't have a pricing system that could cope with this sort of change.
If you made the vehicles sufficiently sexy and space aged (rather than just using regular old minibuses), you could easily sell it as "the mass transit of the future". Since the vehicle wouldn't be expected to take huge numbers of people at a time (only really two or three small parties at once), you could make the insides suitably comfortable on a standard van frame.
Russian reactions to US and EU threats has nothing to do with NATO troop numbers, and everything to do with willingness to use it. NATO still has a military which is overwhelmingly powerful compared to Russia's- NATO accounts for something like 60% of the entire planet's military spending, while Russia would be lucky to top 5%.
All that means nothing if you're not willing to engage. And Russia has NATO by the gas pipes. The US would be far more usefully engaged directing some of that military budget to solving that economic conundrum than buying another fighter jet which might never so much as take off in anger.
Unless I'm much mistaken, helium-3 is useful only for nuclear fusion. As controllable cold fusion is *still* "40 years away", and as hot fusion (aka nuclear warheads) are still banned in space under international law (and of unproven use as a propulsion method anyway), then there's still no reason to go to the moon (yet).
IF we ever get cold fusion working, and IF the method of cold fusion we get working could usefully use helium-3, and IF mining the stuff from the moon is cheaper than making use of earth-bound sources, then it might start to look like a good idea.
The US military budget is the same as the next 10 biggest national military budgets put together. Yes, that includes China- and 9 more. Put together. And that's forgetting the fact that the US military isn't just the military of the US- it includes all of the NATO forces (which is fully 5 of the top 10 spenders, and 23 other non-top-10 members), as well as functionally close allies like Japan and South Korea (numbers 5 and 12 in the "top spending" rankings).
The US would be in no great danger if it lopped 5% off of it's military budget. You could cut the budget in half and it would still be larger than numbers 2 and 3 (China and Russia) put together. Again, not even counting NATO.
To put figures on it- the Apollo programme was estimated to have costed $109 billion in 2010 dollar (accounting for inflation). That's for the full 15 year or so programme. The US was estimated to have spent $682 billion in 2013 on the military. So to pay for the entire Apollo programme all over again, you would only need to divert roughly 1.2% of the annual military budget each year.
That would be a considerable extra step for NSA to comply with. If your data is unencrypted, they merely need to scrape the data and away they go- easy mass surveillance of any number of 100's of millions of people.
If they had to take every one of their targets to a secret court (alerting them to their presence while they're at it), mass surveillance would simply not be practical.
The same logic goes for throwing up almost any security barrier. Nothing is unbreakable in the long run, but you can make it so difficult for your opponent that it becomes unprofitable for them to get to you.
Indeed. It is spring in all the waits that actually matter here in the UK- the weather is warm and bright, the cherry blossom is out, the first bumble bees can be seen, and plants are all entering their active growth phase.
Importantly- the weather it's warm. Which from a "need for Russian gas" point of view is all that actually matters.
Crimea is 60% Russian-speakers, 25% or so Ukrainian-speakers, and 15% or so ethnic Tatars. It is fair to assume that most of the ethnic Ukrainians might prefer to be part of Ukraine rather than part of a Russian Federation with zero protection or adoption of their own culture, and Tatars are historically anti-Russian due to the atrocities committed against them during the Soviet era.
Even if you assume that 100% of the Russian-speakers voted to join Russia (which is not guaranteed- a lot of them will have family or cultural ties with the mainland outside of their language), it's extremely difficult to see 97% approval.
As others have pointed out, the last believable poll figures (pre-troubles) on Crimean nationalism had only around 50% of the population for secession. For almost fully half of the population to change their mind in the last 3 months is completely non-credible.
And we shouldn't be surprised. We all know from past experience exactly what effect gun-toting thugs have in the presence of ballot boxes. Even if you're willing to believe there was no "ballot-stuffing" fraud, there's no doubt that it will effect people's confidence to turn up and vote controversially.
Unless my calendar is lying to me, it is now spring and has been for several weeks. The weather is nice, too. If anything, the longer they stall from now the more likely it is that sanctions will spill into next winter.
I don't buy that as the reason for stalling. I think it's just genuine reluctance to go past the point of no return.
Slashdot Mirror
Solar thermal still makes sense where the aim is to generate heat, rather than electricity. As a method of heating water (either for domestic or industrial purposes) it will always be tough to beat, boasting as it does a zero wastage conversion rate (because there is no conversion- you produce the desired end product straight away).
An awful lot of energy is expended to produce heating, so cutting out the electrical middle-man is no bad thing. There is also no reason why you can't distribute hot water via pipes from a central solar heating installation.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this would only "prove" the existence of (that variety of) multiverse in a very small subset of universes.
So, let's say I try to poison myself with a pill from a bottle containing 99 cyanide pills and 1 sugar pill. There is a 99% chance I'll die, and a 1% chance I'll live. So in 1% of all universes, I live. I repeat the expriement multiple times, until only 1 in 1 million universes has a surviving me in. That means that in 0.0001% of universes, a very smug version of me is winning a Nobel prize for proving the existence of the multiverse. In 99.9999% of universes, I am dead and nothing has been proven except that I really shouldn't be allowed access to the lab's supply of cyanide pills.
Both wine and "ale" beers are made with saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast. Although there are different strands preferred for different styles of wine and beer, the differences shouldn't be too over the top. You're not going to end up with a fine best bitter with champagne yeast, nor are you going to get a competition-standard claret with ale yeast- but the results will be drinkable and tasty enough. See, for example, "champale" (beer brewed with champagne yeast which has been sold commercially).
Lager is made with a different species of yeast (s. carlsbergensis). So using a wine yeast is never likely to make a decent approximation of a lager.
Source: Have been making wines and beers for a decade, including many experimental batches as per the above.
As others have pointed out, you wouldn't need to describe a human to a molecular level. You could create a biological clone using just the DNA- the human genome is some 24 gigabits (3 gigabytes?). That'd be something like "a few hours" to transfer over a standard home internet connection. Arguably, there are big chunks of that genome which will be common across individuals, so you wouldn't even need to transmit the whole thing every time.
Transferring a human's consciousness would be more difficult. As far as I'm aware, there are no serious estimates as to how "big", in bits/bytes terms, the human consciousness might be. Even if you could scan one, and it was a reasonable size for transmission, I can't even imagine how you'd go about "implanting it" into another human body (e.g. a clone). Without that, there's no "I'll just download into a Martian clone and have an explore".
We have perhaps 100 trillion years to fill before the stars have gone out. The universe is only 13.5 billion years old. That means we are so far only 0.0135% of the way into the lifespan of the universe, with 99.9965% left to go.
Might as well do something to fill the time!
Growing clones is hardly magic (and that is all "printing humans" means in this context). We can already do it with provisos (i.e., with the right embryonic cells and so forth)- there's no reason to assume we won't learn better methods as biology progresses. Animals grow new animals in their wombs out of nothing but carbon and nutrients all the time- can't be impossible to replicate.
The "magic" bit is transferring consciousness of one human to another human body. Nobody has the foggiest how that would work. But then, if all you wanted was a populated colony, who said you even need to do that? Grow the little humans to adulthood and raise them using robotic machines, and voila- one new colony, without the hassle of transporting 100's of humans 10's of light-years through space.
It is disingenuous to count XP's support period from its first release date, considering that each Service Pack represented as big a change to the OS as each Ubuntu release (for example).
Support for original XP (without a Service Pack) ended in 2005- only 4 years supported. The last Service Pack, SP3, was released in 2008- giving it a respectable 6 years supported. If XP had exited support when it was scheduled to (2012- it was only extended due to a Microsoft product-line-up cockup at the hight of the netbook craze), it would have had 4 years in support too- less than any of the others you named.
Even if you stubbornly disagree with what I'm saying about SPs and wish to count it all the way from SP0-SP3 end of support, might I also reiterate above that support was only extended at the last minute due to a Microsoft cockup- namely, that Vista was wildly unsuited to the then very popular netbooks. The standard offer from Microsoft is 10 years support (which is what you might reasonably expect to receive from Windows 8). This is the same as Red Hat, and comparable with other Enterprise-market OSs.
Morally, no. Legally, yeah it's still wrong. There are pretty strict laws against vigilantism. At its simplest, you've got the principal of "innocence until proven guilty" to contend with- you THINK he did it, in fact you think you KNOW he did it, but no court has been persuaded of that fact. You're pretty damned sure that the laptop you took is yours (pretty bloody damned sure- they're easily identifiable items)- but unless you've persuaded a court that it's yours, you're still in the wrong.
It sucks, but it's life.
I tend to trust Snopes on this one:
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/...
Sadly.
Goldfish shoals, nibbling at my toes
Debatable, but I would bet the long-term money on LibreOffice. Why? Licensing. LO is under the LGPL, while OO is under the APL. LO is able to reuse any OO code that they like, nicking any cool new features Apache develop. OO cannot- the LGPL will not allow it. So if OO develop any cool new features or improvements, they'll turn up in LO one release later. If LO develop any cool features or improvements of their own, it remains an LO exclusive.
Cost of a PC monitor = the cost of a TV to use with a console. Do you count the cost of the £500 TV in your lounge when you count the cost of your PS4? In my case, I've had the same two monitors (dual screen) hooked up to my PC for around than 10 years now- and one of them was free second hand in the first place. My lounge TV, on the other hand, I chose specifically and spent good money on not so long ago.
Cost of a router applies equally to both console and PC. Both of them need to connect to the internet, and both of them will have the same "advantage" in reduced latencies, if you're so inclined.
So the cost of my PC which could be fairly compared to a console would be- the PC itself and all internals came to around £500. The mouse was £50, but it is getting towards 10 years old now (was a good Logitech MX518, and is still going strong). The headphones were about £7.50. I own a joystick, and although I hardly use it I'll include the cost- it was around £25, bought in an offer along with X-Wing Alliance back in 2000 or so (Microsoft Sidewinder, still works perfectly). Keyboard came bundled free with the PC case (as did a decent mouse which I don't use). So total cost- perhaps £580 or so, ignoring the fact that several peripherals have survived multiple PCs.
More expensive than a console with a single controller, sure. But not exactly breaking the flipping bank.
People say that Slashdot has fallen a long way...but that's just sad. A thread about a AAA game which is being released on Linux- with no mention in TFS, nor the chosen TFA, and only a tiny comment batch discussing it.
Even Reddit managed better coverage of the fact this is a Linux game than Slashdot. If I was just relying on Slashdot for my news, I wouldn't even have known this WAS a Linux game.
I used to have relatives who owned a pig farm. Boiling the slops was a standard part of their routine.
They actually used to have arrangements with all of the local pubs and restaurants, which every day would collect all of the plate scrapings, left overs and kitchen offcuts into slop buckets. Every morning my uncle would go around collecting the slop buckets and take them back to the farm, where they would all be emptied into a big vat and boiled for a number of hours. The end result would be a mushy stuff with the texture and smell of vomit, but which would be sterile of any nasties that could harm the pigs. The pigs loved the stuff. Filthy buggers.
Chucking a few jars of peanut putter into the mix every day would have been easy enough.
Of course that wouldn't even be strictly necessary, seeing as the manufacturer of the peanut butter seems to be swearing blind that the product is uncontaminated and fit for human consumption. If the farmer were happy with this, they could go nuts and just feed it straight to the pigs.
Then sell it as livestock feed. Pigs eat far worse than peanut butter. Boil it up along with the rest of the slops to kill off any salmonella, and it'll be perfectly safe (if disgusting, from a human point of view).
Still a waste of perfectly good human food, but at least it's better than burying it with the trash.
Seems like it would have been easy enough for their lawyers to draw up a contract to fix this. One which says "Costco is returning full ownership of this product to the manufacturer and is absolved of all responsibility for it's future uses". Then the manufacturer would have been free to resell it (or donate it), and would be fully liable for any risks. It sounds like the supplier is in some financial difficulty, so would have welcomed the chance to relabel and sell it on to a different retailer. Seeing as Costco weren't willing to pay for it, I don't see what objection they should have to that- and it's not like that decision would have any impact on their competition (i.e., it's not like their competitors would have to do without peanut butter if this shipment gets destroyed).
Sounds like corporate apathy to me. It's simply easiest for Costco to destroy a batch that they aren't willing to sell, and they have no motivation to do anything else.
"Travelling fast" is one thing, "travelling fast in such a way as to successfully arrive in orbit of a planet light-years away without missing and getting lost in space" is another, and "travelling fast in such a way as to rendezvous with an impossibly tiny ship halfway into the interstellar void launched centuries ago, slow down enough to dock with it, drastically reconfigure it mid-flight, then speed back up again and still arrive in orbit of a planet light-years away" is still yet a third thing.
Basically- doing that would be REALLY hard.
You've sort of hit on the problem and solution. What we need is something that is not called a "taxi" for this. Rather than taking the existing taxi system and adding ride sharing, we should supplement taxis with a new form of public transport based on this system. The new system would be somewhere between a bus and a taxi- a medium sized public vehicle (perhaps "minibus" size), but which would be summoned on demand and travel to your chosen destination like a taxi rather than travelling a fixed schedule like a bus.
This would solve both of the obvious problems- the first being that people who order taxis expect a private vehicle taking the shortest trip possiblem and the second being that existing taxi drivers and firms don't have a pricing system that could cope with this sort of change.
If you made the vehicles sufficiently sexy and space aged (rather than just using regular old minibuses), you could easily sell it as "the mass transit of the future". Since the vehicle wouldn't be expected to take huge numbers of people at a time (only really two or three small parties at once), you could make the insides suitably comfortable on a standard van frame.
Russian reactions to US and EU threats has nothing to do with NATO troop numbers, and everything to do with willingness to use it. NATO still has a military which is overwhelmingly powerful compared to Russia's- NATO accounts for something like 60% of the entire planet's military spending, while Russia would be lucky to top 5%.
All that means nothing if you're not willing to engage. And Russia has NATO by the gas pipes. The US would be far more usefully engaged directing some of that military budget to solving that economic conundrum than buying another fighter jet which might never so much as take off in anger.
Unless I'm much mistaken, helium-3 is useful only for nuclear fusion. As controllable cold fusion is *still* "40 years away", and as hot fusion (aka nuclear warheads) are still banned in space under international law (and of unproven use as a propulsion method anyway), then there's still no reason to go to the moon (yet).
IF we ever get cold fusion working, and IF the method of cold fusion we get working could usefully use helium-3, and IF mining the stuff from the moon is cheaper than making use of earth-bound sources, then it might start to look like a good idea.
The US military budget is the same as the next 10 biggest national military budgets put together. Yes, that includes China- and 9 more. Put together. And that's forgetting the fact that the US military isn't just the military of the US- it includes all of the NATO forces (which is fully 5 of the top 10 spenders, and 23 other non-top-10 members), as well as functionally close allies like Japan and South Korea (numbers 5 and 12 in the "top spending" rankings).
The US would be in no great danger if it lopped 5% off of it's military budget. You could cut the budget in half and it would still be larger than numbers 2 and 3 (China and Russia) put together. Again, not even counting NATO.
To put figures on it- the Apollo programme was estimated to have costed $109 billion in 2010 dollar (accounting for inflation). That's for the full 15 year or so programme. The US was estimated to have spent $682 billion in 2013 on the military. So to pay for the entire Apollo programme all over again, you would only need to divert roughly 1.2% of the annual military budget each year.
That would be a considerable extra step for NSA to comply with. If your data is unencrypted, they merely need to scrape the data and away they go- easy mass surveillance of any number of 100's of millions of people.
If they had to take every one of their targets to a secret court (alerting them to their presence while they're at it), mass surveillance would simply not be practical.
The same logic goes for throwing up almost any security barrier. Nothing is unbreakable in the long run, but you can make it so difficult for your opponent that it becomes unprofitable for them to get to you.
Indeed. It is spring in all the waits that actually matter here in the UK- the weather is warm and bright, the cherry blossom is out, the first bumble bees can be seen, and plants are all entering their active growth phase.
Importantly- the weather it's warm. Which from a "need for Russian gas" point of view is all that actually matters.
Crimea is 60% Russian-speakers, 25% or so Ukrainian-speakers, and 15% or so ethnic Tatars. It is fair to assume that most of the ethnic Ukrainians might prefer to be part of Ukraine rather than part of a Russian Federation with zero protection or adoption of their own culture, and Tatars are historically anti-Russian due to the atrocities committed against them during the Soviet era.
Even if you assume that 100% of the Russian-speakers voted to join Russia (which is not guaranteed- a lot of them will have family or cultural ties with the mainland outside of their language), it's extremely difficult to see 97% approval.
As others have pointed out, the last believable poll figures (pre-troubles) on Crimean nationalism had only around 50% of the population for secession. For almost fully half of the population to change their mind in the last 3 months is completely non-credible.
And we shouldn't be surprised. We all know from past experience exactly what effect gun-toting thugs have in the presence of ballot boxes. Even if you're willing to believe there was no "ballot-stuffing" fraud, there's no doubt that it will effect people's confidence to turn up and vote controversially.
Unless my calendar is lying to me, it is now spring and has been for several weeks. The weather is nice, too. If anything, the longer they stall from now the more likely it is that sanctions will spill into next winter.
I don't buy that as the reason for stalling. I think it's just genuine reluctance to go past the point of no return.