Heh. My college got in a couple of IBM 5100s for a while to play with. We had a 360/50 (and a Burroughs B6700). The new-fangled 5150s (aka, IBM PCs) didn't come in until a few years later.
planting trees (even at a greater rate than we're cutting down the rain forest) is not a practical solution for attenuating global warming when we're releasing billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.
Actually, it is. Growing trees are about the best sequesters of CO2 around, and human-contributed CO2 only amounts to a fraction of natural global CO2 production so it might make the difference. (The argument being that even though humans only produce a portion of total CO2, it's that portion that makes the difference.)
lifestyle changes like using less plastics, [...] are just common sense
Common sense has nothing to do with planetological engineering, there are too many feedback cycles involved. If we used more plastics, say on the order of about 7 quadrillion styrofoam cups, and floated those on the ocean (covering about 10% of the surface), we'd so increase Earth's overall albedo that we'd be risking a runaway snowball effect. Just a thought.
"Blink" took the Hugo Award (voted by science fiction fans registered for Worldcon) this year for "Best Dramatic Presentation - Short Form". In 2007 that award went to the Dr. Who episode "The Girl in the Fireplace", also by Steven Moffat, and the year before that to "The Empty Child", again by Steven Moffat.
If you mean the scene in Juggler of Worlds, yes - rewritten with co-author Edward Lerner. Not so much rewritten (the events are the same) but retold from a different viewpoint (ie, Nessus's).
I heartily recommend the book to any fan of Known Space.
though Niven did write one animated Star Trek episode
Well, yes and no. It was an adaptation (which he did) of his earlier Known Space story, "The Soft Weapon", with Spock substituting for the Puppeteer Nessus in the animation (and other minor variations). (As I'm sure you knew.) Thus the Kzinti end up the Star Trek universe.
(Niven also did some episodes of "Land of the Lost", none based on his Known Space stories, AFAIK.)
Orion is the best solution for *what*? Sending humans to the moon? Sending humans to Mars? Both of these are silly ideas. Humans did not evolve to tolerate the nasties of interplanetary or interstellar space.
Humans didn't evolve to tolerate the nasties of temperate zone winters, either, but tens or hundreds of millions of us live in temperate (and worse) zones. Humans did evolve to develop technologies that let us adapt the environment to ourselves, rather than the other way around.
Making the Solar System safe for robots doesn't do a damn thing for us if a Big Rock hits the Earth. We haven't evolved to survive that, either.
I have an old AMD K5 laptop, currently running Windows 98. Will Linux run on that?
It will, but depending on the memory you might have to back a few versions to get a distro to fit. My first Linux box had a K5 processor, and for years I used an IBM laptop with a P-166 and 48 MB RAM with Linux. For that matter I've still got a couple of old desktop P-166/64M boxes doing firewall and mail server duty (overkill, but the price was right).
As much as some people would like to portray this as decided fact, this really is only a matter of opinion since we lack the ability to perform meaningful (as in, all factors are controlled or accounted for) experiment.
I'm sorry, but "Global warming is not anthropogenic" is no longer a credible scientific position.
Among political scientists perhaps, physical scientists and particularly climatologists would argue otherwise.
The fact is that CO2 is a relatively minor greenhouse gas (the effects of water vapor are several times as great), and anthropogenic contributions are a small percentage of global CO2 production (be eg geochemical processes). It may not even be the case that increased CO2 (of whatever cause) raises global temperature: the opposite may be true (increases in temperature increase atmospheric CO2 levels).
Some people think that the scientific evidence from past climate changes, present observations, and future physical predictions, is that there are "cliffs" nearby,
You're driving in complete darkness and someone tells you there might be a cliff nearby. You're told to err on the side of caution. What do you do? Speed up?
That depends on how believable that someone is. If he's known for being mistaken about nearby cliffs, and somebody else tells me that we're being chased by large carnivores or men with guns, then yeah, the prudent thing might be to speed up.
(Some people will turn anything into a car analogy.)
My own personal view is that there's a heck of a lot that we don't know about the mechanics of the atmosphere. Until we figure everything else out, though, it's probably a good idea to err on the side of caution.
And which side is caution on, exactly? Spending money (that could be used for other things) to reduce CO2 emissions "just in case", or not spending money tinkering with CO2 because if global warming turns out not to be anthropogenic, we could bring on the next (little?) ice age?
(I happen to think the effects of a minor global temperature increase are a lot less serious than the effects of another ice age, but that my just be my Canadian upbringing talking.)
Strictly speaking, the Ariane 5 first flight mishap was a specification bug, not a coding bug, so it depends on your definition as to whether it was really a "software" bug. (Even more strictly speaking, it was a procedures bug: they left running an inertial measurement unit that wasn't needed after launch (it provided ground reference for the nav system while on the pad). They'd done this on Ariane 4 but the 4's flight profile didn't take the unit out of limits the way 5's did.)
Wallace was taken from the hall, stripped naked and dragged through the city at the heels of a horse to the Elms at Smithfield. He was hanged, drawn and quartered -- strangled by hanging but released while still alive, emasculated, eviscerated and his bowels burnt before him, beheaded, then cut into four parts. His preserved head was placed on a pike atop London Bridge. It was later joined by the heads of the brothers, John and Simon Fraser. His limbs were displayed, separately, in Newcastle upon Tyne, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Stirling, and Aberdeen.
The light angle is probably part of it. Another factor may be crater age. On the Moon, more recent craters (and ejecta debris) is lighter in color than the older stuff, this may also be true on Mercury.
Well, no, they'd still be meteors and meteorites. But the mark it leaves (crater or geological crater remnants) is called an astrobleme.
The rock (actually more nickel-iron) that formed the Barringer Crater in Arizona was big enough to be called an asteroid, the crater is also known as Meteor Crater and the remaining fragments of the asteroid are called meteorites (Canyon Diablo meteorites, named as per tradition after the nearest post office). The crater itself is an astrobleme.
Of course if the surviving fragments were originally from Superman's home planet, they're called kryptonite.
Right. Those that don't plug in their cars stick cardboard in front of the radiator in winter to give the engine a chance to warm up;-)
If you have an attached enclosed garage your car will probably stay warm enough, ditto if you live in southern Ontario where the winters aren't too bad. Other places, some folks use a battery warmer in addition to the block heater.
This is how nearly all non-electric trains (ie, trains that don't pick up their power from external wires or rails) work, (excluding a few antique steam engines). Nearly all diesel locomotives are actually diesel-electrics, with the diesel engine turning a generator which provides electrical power to the drive motors. Considering the torque needed to get a train moving, it makes a lot of sense.
There are plenty of places we could store nuclear waste for geologically significant lengths of time without hazard. Most of them are too close to some ignorant person's back yard.
Simplest thing would be just to dump it back down the uranium mine from whence the nuclear material first came. Vitrification is also extremely stable.
Nuclear is renewable if you use the right reactor designs. (Okay, not really renewable, but you can generate fuel-grade material from vastly larger reserves of non-fuel-grade material.) And it doesn't take much -- a thimbleful of reactor fuel has the energy equivalent of a trainload of coal (and if you've never seen a coal train, they are long suckers, often up to a mile long).
Slashdot Mirror
Running the Welsh through the InterTran translator gives us: "Bit I am being crookedly the office at this time. You send any time I w translate."
It's probably something to do with Torchwood.
Did your high school have an IBM 5150?'
Heh. My college got in a couple of IBM 5100s for a while to play with. We had a 360/50 (and a Burroughs B6700). The new-fangled 5150s (aka, IBM PCs) didn't come in until a few years later.
planting trees (even at a greater rate than we're cutting down the rain forest) is not a practical solution for attenuating global warming when we're releasing billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.
Actually, it is. Growing trees are about the best sequesters of CO2 around, and human-contributed CO2 only amounts to a fraction of natural global CO2 production so it might make the difference. (The argument being that even though humans only produce a portion of total CO2, it's that portion that makes the difference.)
lifestyle changes like using less plastics, [...] are just common sense
Common sense has nothing to do with planetological engineering, there are too many feedback cycles involved. If we used more plastics, say on the order of about 7 quadrillion styrofoam cups, and floated those on the ocean (covering about 10% of the surface), we'd so increase Earth's overall albedo that we'd be risking a runaway snowball effect. Just a thought.
"Blink" took the Hugo Award (voted by science fiction fans registered for Worldcon) this year for "Best Dramatic Presentation - Short Form". In 2007 that award went to the Dr. Who episode "The Girl in the Fireplace", also by Steven Moffat, and the year before that to "The Empty Child", again by Steven Moffat.
Not a bad track record.
If you mean the scene in Juggler of Worlds, yes - rewritten with co-author Edward Lerner. Not so much rewritten (the events are the same) but retold from a different viewpoint (ie, Nessus's).
I heartily recommend the book to any fan of Known Space.
Ursula Andress did it first (single shot, not machine gun) in The Tenth Victim.
though Niven did write one animated Star Trek episode
Well, yes and no. It was an adaptation (which he did) of his earlier Known Space story, "The Soft Weapon", with Spock substituting for the Puppeteer Nessus in the animation (and other minor variations). (As I'm sure you knew.) Thus the Kzinti end up the Star Trek universe.
(Niven also did some episodes of "Land of the Lost", none based on his Known Space stories, AFAIK.)
Orion is the best solution for *what*? Sending humans to the moon? Sending humans to Mars? Both of these are silly ideas. Humans did not evolve to tolerate the nasties of interplanetary or interstellar space.
Humans didn't evolve to tolerate the nasties of temperate zone winters, either, but tens or hundreds of millions of us live in temperate (and worse) zones. Humans did evolve to develop technologies that let us adapt the environment to ourselves, rather than the other way around.
Making the Solar System safe for robots doesn't do a damn thing for us if a Big Rock hits the Earth. We haven't evolved to survive that, either.
Free(libre) software is also open source, but not all open source software is free.
For more detail, see any of RMS's sermons on the matter.
I have an old AMD K5 laptop, currently running Windows 98. Will Linux run on that?
It will, but depending on the memory you might have to back a few versions to get a distro to fit. My first Linux box had a K5 processor, and for years I used an IBM laptop with a P-166 and 48 MB RAM with Linux. For that matter I've still got a couple of old desktop P-166/64M boxes doing firewall and mail server duty (overkill, but the price was right).
As much as some people would like to portray this as decided fact, this really is only a matter of opinion since we lack the ability to perform meaningful (as in, all factors are controlled or accounted for) experiment.
I'm sorry, but "Global warming is not anthropogenic" is no longer a credible scientific position.
Among political scientists perhaps, physical scientists and particularly climatologists would argue otherwise.
The fact is that CO2 is a relatively minor greenhouse gas (the effects of water vapor are several times as great), and anthropogenic contributions are a small percentage of global CO2 production (be eg geochemical processes). It may not even be the case that increased CO2 (of whatever cause) raises global temperature: the opposite may be true (increases in temperature increase atmospheric CO2 levels).
Some people think that the scientific evidence from past climate changes, present observations, and future physical predictions, is that there are "cliffs" nearby,
There, fixed that for you.
You're driving in complete darkness and someone tells you there might be a cliff nearby. You're told to err on the side of caution. What do you do? Speed up?
That depends on how believable that someone is. If he's known for being mistaken about nearby cliffs, and somebody else tells me that we're being chased by large carnivores or men with guns, then yeah, the prudent thing might be to speed up.
(Some people will turn anything into a car analogy.)
My own personal view is that there's a heck of a lot that we don't know about the mechanics of the atmosphere. Until we figure everything else out, though, it's probably a good idea to err on the side of caution.
And which side is caution on, exactly? Spending money (that could be used for other things) to reduce CO2 emissions "just in case", or not spending money tinkering with CO2 because if global warming turns out not to be anthropogenic, we could bring on the next (little?) ice age?
(I happen to think the effects of a minor global temperature increase are a lot less serious than the effects of another ice age, but that my just be my Canadian upbringing talking.)
Strictly speaking, the Ariane 5 first flight mishap was a specification bug, not a coding bug, so it depends on your definition as to whether it was really a "software" bug. (Even more strictly speaking, it was a procedures bug: they left running an inertial measurement unit that wasn't needed after launch (it provided ground reference for the nav system while on the pad). They'd done this on Ariane 4 but the 4's flight profile didn't take the unit out of limits the way 5's did.)
Here's a tip: cook the meat before eating it.
Jail, hell. Death penalty.
Or what they did to William Wallace:
(from Wikipedia).
I've got some, what do you want moderated?
Oh, wait...
The light angle is probably part of it. Another factor may be crater age. On the Moon, more recent craters (and ejecta debris) is lighter in color than the older stuff, this may also be true on Mercury.
Well, no, they'd still be meteors and meteorites. But the mark it leaves (crater or geological crater remnants) is called an astrobleme.
The rock (actually more nickel-iron) that formed the Barringer Crater in Arizona was big enough to be called an asteroid, the crater is also known as Meteor Crater and the remaining fragments of the asteroid are called meteorites (Canyon Diablo meteorites, named as per tradition after the nearest post office). The crater itself is an astrobleme.
Of course if the surviving fragments were originally from Superman's home planet, they're called kryptonite.
It's an asteroid until it enters the atmosphere.
No, if it's less than 10 meters diameter it's only a meteoroid.
Right. Those that don't plug in their cars stick cardboard in front of the radiator in winter to give the engine a chance to warm up ;-)
If you have an attached enclosed garage your car will probably stay warm enough, ditto if you live in southern Ontario where the winters aren't too bad. Other places, some folks use a battery warmer in addition to the block heater.
This is how nearly all non-electric trains (ie, trains that don't pick up their power from external wires or rails) work, (excluding a few antique steam engines). Nearly all diesel locomotives are actually diesel-electrics, with the diesel engine turning a generator which provides electrical power to the drive motors. Considering the torque needed to get a train moving, it makes a lot of sense.
There are plenty of places we could store nuclear waste for geologically significant lengths of time without hazard. Most of them are too close to some ignorant person's back yard.
Simplest thing would be just to dump it back down the uranium mine from whence the nuclear material first came. Vitrification is also extremely stable.
Nuclear is renewable if you use the right reactor designs. (Okay, not really renewable, but you can generate fuel-grade material from vastly larger reserves of non-fuel-grade material.) And it doesn't take much -- a thimbleful of reactor fuel has the energy equivalent of a trainload of coal (and if you've never seen a coal train, they are long suckers, often up to a mile long).