In the unlikely event that a gunpowder ban was passed, within a couple of weeks there'd be ammunition on the market that used something other than gunpowder (as it is, there are quite a few different chemical combinations already used in ammunition, most of which are nothing like the traditional saltpeter/sulfur/charcoal gunpowder (aka black powder), but rather are nitrocellulose derivatives).
A couple of weeks after that there'd be guns that don't use conventional ammunition at all. Consider something like an air rifle with a flammable gas mixed in and ignited when the trigger is pulled. A little more complicated than current mechanisms, perhaps, but basically the same as a car engine's combustion chamber with a barrel attached.
(1) rotates your search queries randomly across different search sites (google, bing, etc, etc) so that no one site has all your search history, and
(2) periodically sends random search queries to those sites (quietly ignoring the results) so that there's (a) some plausible deniability that any given search was really yours and (b) raises the noise level in the data the search hosts are collecting.
As has every other science fiction writer who writes space opera or interstellar sf. Some of those planets might even exist;-)
Mind, even though several of us might agree that there's a, say, Delta Pavonis III, it's unlikely that we'll agree on the non-designatory name (unless we're writing in the same shared universe). Frank Herbert called it Caladan in Dune, I call it Verdigris in my T-Space series (it's green with skyweed). Other authors have named planets in the Delta Pavonis system without being specific about whether or not they're third from their sun. These guys have the same problem.
Btw, the current naming convention for exoplanets is $PRIMARY-b, -c, -d.. etc in order of discovery, where the primary star is considered 'a'. SF conventional designation is I, II, III, IV etc (roman numerals) in order of average distance from the primary -- which assumes we know all the planets in a star's system.
It won't work. Vodka -- and in fact most liquors -- are mostly water. 80-proof beverages are only 40% alcohol, and it needs to be at least 50% (100 proof) alcohol* to burn (strong stuff like 151-proof rum is sold with a flame arrestor built into the top of the bottle.)
(*If the beverage is warmed you can coax a flame off of the alcohol evaporating out of the liquid -- this is how you ignite brandy; it has to be warmed first. But as soon as you splash it or try to spray it, it will cool below the ignition point.)
If the bottle is glass it would make a more dangerous weapon than the liquid inside it.
Don't believe everything your high school physics teacher tells you.
Laser diodes are not the same as normal LEDs (although they are, obviously, light emitting diodes). While there may be some cheap LED flashlights masquerading as laser pointers, it's pretty easy to tell coherent laser light from random non-laser LED light, and most laser pointers (including the couple I have here) use real coherent light. (The clue is in the speckle pattern the light makes on a non-glossy surface.)
Both original sentences are missing a subject; the adjective dangles.
The correct form of the second sentence (using "healthily") has already been pointed out (presumably, nobody wants to eat diseased food). The correct form of the first sentence would be "I like to eat Italians."
Pascal was designed to be (a) easy to teach and (b) easy to compile (not necessarily in that order).
Declaration at point of first use can break programs in block-scoped languages like Pascal or Algol. It's easier to teach a newbie to just declare everything in the outermost block (of a given procedure/function) than worry about whether something will still be in scope a few 'end' delimiters later.
If your procedures are of reasonable length (no more than a few dozen LOC), that's locality of reference enough.
(And a recursive-descent compiler for (original) Pascal is dead easy, maybe 3 to 4 KLOC in Pascal.)
Dude, if the language is Turing-complete you can write anything in anything. If you can't think of a way, that's your failure of imagination, not a failure of the language.
Hell, the Apollo spacecraft were programmed in the languages of the 60s... if not the 50s.
Making handguns unavailable would do a lot to end gangland murders.
And if we had antigravity we wouldn't need bridges.
That's about as likely as making handguns unavailable. As for ending gangland murders... in Canada handguns are nearly impossible for civilians to get hold of, but when I lived in Quebec (over 30 yrs ago) the gangsters had no problem using various illegal weapons, including sawed-off shotguns and even submachine guns. Or for more targeted assassinations, a few sticks of dynamite.
To build a one of AK it might require better than 50K. And that is probably a low estimate. To try to hammer out such pieces using methods familiar to black smiths would at best yield an inferior product.
Or not. Googling "ak from a shovel" will turn up a lot of links (here's one) to the guy who built himself an AK-47 from a shovel -- mostly using blacksmith techniques. (Okay, he did buy the barrel blank ($30) and a few other bits).
It would be totally unjust to the millions of innocent North Koreans who are trapped under the oppressive totalitarian regime.
It's up to those millions of "innocent" NK's to overthrow their oppressive totalitarian regime if they don't want to suffer for its actions. No, that wouldn't be easy, but it's probably easier than surviving a nuclear counter-strike. The US overthrew an oppressive regime of its own, once, as have many other countries. Nobody said it was easy.
If the US didn't respond in kind to a nuclear first strike, the credibility of the nuclear deterrent goes down the toilet.
People should be held accountable for the actions of their governments... it encourages them to choose their governments more carefully. All governments -- even dictatorships -- serve at the consent (or at least, acquiescence, amounting to the same thing) of the governed.
For another story in that vein, see Brad Torgersen's "Outbound" in Analog a couple years back (probably also available in ebook form).
(Disclaimer, Brad's a friend of mine and occasional co-author.)
If -- and it's a freaking huge if -- we can develop fusion units that can be built (or bootstrapped from) something you can carry with you in a ship, then we can (slowly) spread from star to star hopping from one Oort cloud object to the next, just like your Polynesian islanders. (Even though I write about barely theoretically possible warp drives -- because they're more fun -- I believe the above is more likely.)
Coal is 84% carbon, 10% oxygen, 4% hydrogen, and 2% nitrogen (or so). Short of nuclear fission or fusion, you're going to get carbon and oxygen out of it no matter what you do.
Now there's an idea. You'd actually get more energy running the 0.0...whatever percent thorium that's in coal through a fission reactor than you do by oxidizing the carbon.
Plus, it's sometimes inconvenient when a train track has a level crossing with 'regular' traffic.
The 'trains' (aka Light Rail) in downtown Denver happily share the streets with regular traffic (out of downtown they have their own rights of way and grade-separated crossings).
Of course, growing up in Toronto we called them 'streetcars', and they even crossed each others' tracks (and wires).
The point is that if you're not loading the thing down with batteries that need to be charged, you don't need quite so whopping many Joules to move them. (And if you do, you can recover a lot of those Joules with regenerative braking.)
A distinguishing characteristic of trains is that they run on fixed tracks. The kind of thing that's easy to put a third rail beside or a wire overhead. Why TF would you need to charge them?
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Given that the internet (okay, ARPANET) was actually invented in 1969, Dick's book wasn't that much ahead of its time. TCP came a few years later.
(1969 was a surprisingly watershed year: first (and second) manned moon landing, the beginning of the internet, and the development of UNIX.)
September 3rd 1752 wasn't the anniversary of anything.
Ah, but that's not a day on the calendar (in some countries) now is it?
And here I thought we had a monopoly on stupid politicians here in the States.
Alas, "stupid politician" is a redundancy the world over.
Justin Trudeau? Son of Pierre "War Measures Act" Trudeau?
I gather you're too young to remember armed forces on the streets of Ottawa (among other places) in combat fatigues and carrying machine guns.
Camelot, huh?
"Well 'ow do you know 'e's a king?"
"Because 'e doesn't have shit all over 'im."
In the unlikely event that a gunpowder ban was passed, within a couple of weeks there'd be ammunition on the market that used something other than gunpowder (as it is, there are quite a few different chemical combinations already used in ammunition, most of which are nothing like the traditional saltpeter/sulfur/charcoal gunpowder (aka black powder), but rather are nitrocellulose derivatives).
A couple of weeks after that there'd be guns that don't use conventional ammunition at all. Consider something like an air rifle with a flammable gas mixed in and ignited when the trigger is pulled. A little more complicated than current mechanisms, perhaps, but basically the same as a car engine's combustion chamber with a barrel attached.
A browser plug-in that:
(1) rotates your search queries randomly across different search sites (google, bing, etc, etc) so that no one site has all your search history, and
(2) periodically sends random search queries to those sites (quietly ignoring the results) so that there's (a) some plausible deniability that any given search was really yours and (b) raises the noise level in the data the search hosts are collecting.
As has every other science fiction writer who writes space opera or interstellar sf. Some of those planets might even exist ;-)
Mind, even though several of us might agree that there's a, say, Delta Pavonis III, it's unlikely that we'll agree on the non-designatory name (unless we're writing in the same shared universe). Frank Herbert called it Caladan in Dune, I call it Verdigris in my T-Space series (it's green with skyweed). Other authors have named planets in the Delta Pavonis system without being specific about whether or not they're third from their sun. These guys have the same problem.
Btw, the current naming convention for exoplanets is $PRIMARY-b, -c, -d .. etc in order of discovery, where the primary star is considered 'a'. SF conventional designation is I, II, III, IV etc (roman numerals) in order of average distance from the primary -- which assumes we know all the planets in a star's system.
Molotov cocktail with vodka?
It won't work. Vodka -- and in fact most liquors -- are mostly water. 80-proof beverages are only 40% alcohol, and it needs to be at least 50% (100 proof) alcohol* to burn (strong stuff like 151-proof rum is sold with a flame arrestor built into the top of the bottle.)
(*If the beverage is warmed you can coax a flame off of the alcohol evaporating out of the liquid -- this is how you ignite brandy; it has to be warmed first. But as soon as you splash it or try to spray it, it will cool below the ignition point.)
If the bottle is glass it would make a more dangerous weapon than the liquid inside it.
But planes have been hijacked with knives before 9/12/2001.
Fixed that for you.
That's okay, somebody else can have four and I'll just pass. Still averages two each.
Seriously, can't imagine why a spider would be attracted to CO2. Mosquitoes, yes. Spiders?
Don't believe everything your high school physics teacher tells you.
Laser diodes are not the same as normal LEDs (although they are, obviously, light emitting diodes). While there may be some cheap LED flashlights masquerading as laser pointers, it's pretty easy to tell coherent laser light from random non-laser LED light, and most laser pointers (including the couple I have here) use real coherent light. (The clue is in the speckle pattern the light makes on a non-glossy surface.)
Both original sentences are missing a subject; the adjective dangles.
The correct form of the second sentence (using "healthily") has already been pointed out (presumably, nobody wants to eat diseased food). The correct form of the first sentence would be "I like to eat Italians."
Myself, I am an evangelical agnostic.
I don't know, and you don't either.
Pascal was designed to be (a) easy to teach and (b) easy to compile (not necessarily in that order).
Declaration at point of first use can break programs in block-scoped languages like Pascal or Algol. It's easier to teach a newbie to just declare everything in the outermost block (of a given procedure/function) than worry about whether something will still be in scope a few 'end' delimiters later.
If your procedures are of reasonable length (no more than a few dozen LOC), that's locality of reference enough.
(And a recursive-descent compiler for (original) Pascal is dead easy, maybe 3 to 4 KLOC in Pascal.)
Dude, if the language is Turing-complete you can write anything in anything. If you can't think of a way, that's your failure of imagination, not a failure of the language.
Hell, the Apollo spacecraft were programmed in the languages of the 60s ... if not the 50s.
Rabbits?
Aye, with nasty great pointed teeth...
Making handguns unavailable would do a lot to end gangland murders.
And if we had antigravity we wouldn't need bridges.
That's about as likely as making handguns unavailable. As for ending gangland murders ... in Canada handguns are nearly impossible for civilians to get hold of, but when I lived in Quebec (over 30 yrs ago) the gangsters had no problem using various illegal weapons, including sawed-off shotguns and even submachine guns. Or for more targeted assassinations, a few sticks of dynamite.
To build a one of AK it might require better than 50K. And that is probably a low estimate. To try to hammer out such pieces using methods familiar to black smiths would at best yield an inferior product.
Or not. Googling "ak from a shovel" will turn up a lot of links (here's one) to the guy who built himself an AK-47 from a shovel -- mostly using blacksmith techniques. (Okay, he did buy the barrel blank ($30) and a few other bits).
Oh, I'm sure Adam and Jamie could make it fly ... with the application of sufficient quantities of C-4...
It would be totally unjust to the millions of innocent North Koreans who are trapped under the oppressive totalitarian regime.
It's up to those millions of "innocent" NK's to overthrow their oppressive totalitarian regime if they don't want to suffer for its actions. No, that wouldn't be easy, but it's probably easier than surviving a nuclear counter-strike. The US overthrew an oppressive regime of its own, once, as have many other countries. Nobody said it was easy.
If the US didn't respond in kind to a nuclear first strike, the credibility of the nuclear deterrent goes down the toilet.
People should be held accountable for the actions of their governments ... it encourages them to choose their governments more carefully. All governments -- even dictatorships -- serve at the consent (or at least, acquiescence, amounting to the same thing) of the governed.
For another story in that vein, see Brad Torgersen's "Outbound" in Analog a couple years back (probably also available in ebook form).
(Disclaimer, Brad's a friend of mine and occasional co-author.)
If -- and it's a freaking huge if -- we can develop fusion units that can be built (or bootstrapped from) something you can carry with you in a ship, then we can (slowly) spread from star to star hopping from one Oort cloud object to the next, just like your Polynesian islanders. (Even though I write about barely theoretically possible warp drives -- because they're more fun -- I believe the above is more likely.)
And we have a winner! Kudos to you, sir.
(For those who don't get it, go read some Larry Niven or turn in your geek card.)
Coal is 84% carbon, 10% oxygen, 4% hydrogen, and 2% nitrogen (or so). Short of nuclear fission or fusion, you're going to get carbon and oxygen out of it no matter what you do.
Now there's an idea. You'd actually get more energy running the 0.0...whatever percent thorium that's in coal through a fission reactor than you do by oxidizing the carbon.
Plus, it's sometimes inconvenient when a train track has a level crossing with 'regular' traffic.
The 'trains' (aka Light Rail) in downtown Denver happily share the streets with regular traffic (out of downtown they have their own rights of way and grade-separated crossings).
Of course, growing up in Toronto we called them 'streetcars', and they even crossed each others' tracks (and wires).
The point is that if you're not loading the thing down with batteries that need to be charged, you don't need quite so whopping many Joules to move them. (And if you do, you can recover a lot of those Joules with regenerative braking.)
A distinguishing characteristic of trains is that they run on fixed tracks. The kind of thing that's easy to put a third rail beside or a wire overhead. Why TF would you need to charge them?