If you can't kill him with five shots, then you shouldn't be doing the job in the first place.
Don't forget that you want to use a lower grain count in your rounds, to reduce muzzle velocity. The last thing you need is the "pop" of a supersonic bullet giving you away. To compensate for the reduced muzzle velocity, use a bigger caliber to get the same stopping power.
So: large caliber, reduced power round, flash/sound suppressor on the barrel.
To: Lord Traalogc Sstoarthlx, Undersecretary of Terraforming, Western Spiral Arm Division From: Dr. Flaorlesq Vvaerklyn, Managing Scientist-Supervisor (codename: "The Fun Guy") Re: Status report, Project 8723F-R3381-PTV11-03, Sol-III.
Traal,
It looks like this terraforming project we initiated on Sol-III is finally moving into the stage where it will begin paying off. As you can see from this latest message (attached below), the locals are starting to figure out that their planet is habitible because we gave them a moon of reasonable size. Pretty soon, they'll work out the interplanetary space drive and the cultural embargoes will expire; I give it less than one local year after they get off-world, and they'll be easy pickings for our marketing division. They'll be in hock to us for the rest of all eternity!
I remember how expensive it was to bust up that fifth rocky planet so we could have something to throw at Sol-III, but that nickle & iron core was perfect for the job. It knocked all the light silicates into orbit, and when they coalesced into Sol-III's moon, it was heavy enough to keep the primary's core molten through tidal action, light enough to solidify completely without a liquid core of its own.
True, it's been pretty time-consuming waiting around for semi-intelligent tool users to develop from the primordial life we seeded down there, but as I've said all along, just think how long we'd have had to wait without all of the intelligent designing we've done over the years. It's slower, but still cheaper to grow up our own customers than trying to find naturally occurring ones. You know how incredibly rare habitable planets are in this galaxy. What a dump!
Anyway, it shouldn't be much more than another 600 years, local time, before they get off-world and we can start to really exploit them. The first job will be to get them to do the terraforming of Sol-II. Trust me on this one - they'll work for peanuts.
Cheers,
Lesq
Reproduce the creation of our own moon by throwing...
Why did I start reading that thinking "your own moon" in place of our? And why did it make more sense that way? I think your ruse is getting thin.
You'd have to bring a heck of a lot of hydrogen from somewhere else
Reproduce the creation of our own moon by throwing Pluto at Venus. Any off-center hit will plow Pluto's mass of rock and ice into Venus' crust, vaporizing a good chunk of it and imparting a huge spin to the remaining planetary mass. Granted, that's not enough hydrogen yet, but any system capable of moving Pluto should surely be capable of tossing around other substantial icy bodies.
(from where and at what cost?)
Nuclear powered ion thrusters, shooting ionized hydrogen and oxygen from Pluto's surface. If you can get Pluto moving inward in the first place, the sun's gravity will give you a lot of the extra energy you need to get a really good thwack upon impact with Venus. No doubt, this would be a long, difficult, expensive proposition, but not impossible.
_and_ give it a good spin (with what energy and just how?)
See step #1. The energy comes from the acceleration of Pluto dropping into the sun's gravity well.
_and_ somehow start some plate tectonics mechanism to get the convection currents going in the planet and start its dynamo
See step #1. Melting the planet's surface will make it much amenable to taking a spin.
Let the impact blow away most of the atmosphere, and follow the Pluto hit with a chain of large icy bodies. The vaporized crustal material will either fall back into the surface, which will keep churning the surface up, or it will coalesce in orbit to form a moon, and the tidal interactions will do much the same.
get rid of all that carbon in the atmosphere or all the water will just boil off.
Once you have water, it will get locked up in solid carbonates.
If the collimated beam going into the plasma chamber gained a bunch of energy (42GeV) in the space of 84cm, that means total time of flight in the chamber was in the nanosecond range. That means a jillion collisions with the plasma. Wouldn't this screw up the focus of the beam? Sure, you've got a more powerful pulse of electrons coming out, but they will be sprayed all over the place, so the amount of energy that you can put into your incoming target beam of positrons (or into a stationary target) is diluted, isn't it?
So many people seem to feel that life needs a soundtrack, as though it were a movie in need of a an accompanying score. I just find that constantly having music on interferes with thinking, period.
Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
Even though I sing in a church choir, I don't listen to music much, and I don't own any kind of personal music player, except for my old Walkman, gathering dust in the back of a drawer somewhere. When I have the radio on in the car, it's either talk radio, a book on tape or a lecture on tape (currently 9 hours into a 15-hour seminar on Dante's "Comedia").
I'm very knowledgable about art, history, literature, science, religion, politics, cooking, gardening, hunting, woodworking, and a jillion other things. I like to learn about things that interest other people, and I like to talk about things that interest me. I can hold a conversation and engage in a discussion with someone who holds a different viewpoint, without being disagreeable or opinionated. I have a lot of interests, but music isn't one of them.
But because I don't listen to music, the most obvious middle ground is closed to me. I have no idea who any of the big music stars are these days, and do not recognize a hit tune when it is played for me. Even worse, when I say, "I don't listen to music.", it's assumed that I am a completely uninteresting shlub who's leisure hours are filled with TV sitcom reruns.
Ok, they knew as soon as they saw this subterranean chamber that it was a hobbit hole, because it wasn't a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat.
Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year.
"That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps," Dr. Boggild said. "If you lose that much volume you'd definitely see new islands appear."
.... which would subsequently disappear again as the oceans continued to rise.
People laughed at me when I bought coastline in Kansas. Who'll be laughing last?
Actually, I think it's wonderful that Microsoft thinks so highly of Slashdot as a source of opinion leaders that they'd plant you here to address concerns and answer questions. You are wonderfully knowledgable about Vista and Office 2007, providing all sorts of useful information about how the Office 2007 fonts are designed, exactly how your old macros will be carried over, even minutia such as exactly how many pixels the MS-Ribbon(TM) will occupy.
I especially love how you end every post with some variation on "you are spreading FUD, drink the Kool Aid before you criticize it". It's really a novel approach.
So, I'm concerned about file incompatibility between Microsoft's old product and their new one, but you say I should rest easy, because Microsoft assures me that a downloadable add-on, which they will make available, will integrate perfectly with their old software, making it unnecessary for me to buy their new software.
Really?
This is the assurance that is intended to alleviate any fear, uncertainties or doubts?
Really?
In that case, I feel nothing but serene anticipation of the increased productivity I'll enjoy once my PHB gets Office 2007.
TYNT vs. LYNT: This Year's New Thing vs. Last Year's New Thing
Here's the standard problem with Office upgrades:
As if this weren't enough, Microsoft has also changed the standard file format for Office files. Older versions of Office, on both Windows and Macintosh computers, won't be able to read these new file types without special conversion software.
So, just like with the previous new versions, all of you with the "obsolete" version (say, Office 2003) won't be able to open the memo that the PHB just composed and sent out on his Shiny New Computer that came with Office 2007 pre-loaded. So, everybody has to "upgrade" to Office 2007, and buy new computers to run it.
The new version can, however, read files created in the older versions, on both Windows and Mac, without any conversion software.
So you will still be able to open and read the 10^9 documents created with older versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, so long as you don't need to have all of the formatting, fonts, macros or colors to stay the same. After all, if you couldn't open them at all, you'd dump Word in favor of WordPerfect.
An employer does not have to provide a reasonable accommodation that would cause an "undue hardship" to the employer. Generalized conclusions will not suffice to support a claim of undue hardship. Instead, undue hardship must be based on an individualized assessment of current circumstances that show that a specific reasonable accommodation would cause significant difficulty or expense.(113) A determination of undue hardship should be based on several factors, including:
* the nature and cost of the accommodation needed;
* the overall financial resources of the facility making the reasonable accommodation; the number of persons employed at this facility; the effect on expenses and resources of the facility;
* the overall financial resources, size, number of employees, and type and location of facilities of the employer (if the facility involved in the reasonable accommodation is part of a larger entity);
* the type of operation of the employer, including the structure and functions of the workforce, the geographic separateness, and the administrative or fiscal relationship of the facility involved in making the accommodation to the employer;
* the impact of the accommodation on the operation of the facility.
I'd say that redesigning the money supply would qualify as an undue hardship imposed on the Federal government.
From TFA: But our study demonstrates the possibility that interbreeding contributed advantageous variants into the human gene pool that subsequently spread"
Actually, it probably introduced a bunch of disadvantageous variants, too, but they dissapeared from the population since they were, you guessed it, at a disadvantage.
Variation in the population is one of the drivers of evolution. The more variation, the more likelihood that some members of the population will be significantly more adept at survival and successful reproduction than other members. The most adept do the best, the least adept starve and die.
The devil take the hindmost, and up the ladder we go!
Police report that this guy owns not just one, but several ax-handles! He's an ax-handle nut! I wish the ax-handle lobby would own up to the fact that these things are not just dangerous, but potentially DEADLY!
Effective ax-handle control legislation is long overdue! Think of the children!
Well, maybe all those qualified engineers will go on to find jobs that are more productive, and build better things for society.
Um, here's the relevant quote from TFA:
The job cut is likely to weigh particularly heavily on marketing staff. Intel studies comparing its own staffing levels to competitors' concluded that the ratio of marketing personnel to salespeople was too large, the sources said.
Marketing staff are a necessary evil. They are super important when there's not really much difference between your product and your competitors' (Pepsi vs. Coke, GM vs. Ford, Coors vs. Aquafina, etc.), but they are less important when there is. With the buzz about the Core2Duo chips, the sales staff doesn't need as much razzle dazzle from the marketers, so they're cutting that staff.
They'll probably tell the excess marketing staffers some story about a giant space goat, and put them on a spaceship, along with the telephone sanitizers.
This classification discussion is far from over...
One of my former bosses had a solution for situations like this (i.e. when someone disagreed with him, or when he was trying to exceed his authority). He would simply shout, "End of discussion!" and leave the room. He saw that as decisive leadership.
So, listen up, jc42, Pluto is not a planet, and neither is the moon. End of discussion!
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome, Slashdot user! Your number is:
#1927465037863
Now serving:
#23740
We will be with you shortly!
For that matter, it would appear that organic chemists only talk to other organic chemists.
Big surprise, eh?
I stand corrected.
I was thinking of "count" with regard to the way rifle ammunition is sold, as 150 grain, 165 grain, 180 grain, etc.
If you can't kill him with five shots, then you shouldn't be doing the job in the first place.
Don't forget that you want to use a lower grain count in your rounds, to reduce muzzle velocity. The last thing you need is the "pop" of a supersonic bullet giving you away. To compensate for the reduced muzzle velocity, use a bigger caliber to get the same stopping power.
So: large caliber, reduced power round, flash/sound suppressor on the barrel.
From: Dr. Flaorlesq Vvaerklyn, Managing Scientist-Supervisor (codename: "The Fun Guy")
Re: Status report, Project 8723F-R3381-PTV11-03, Sol-III.
Traal,
It looks like this terraforming project we initiated on Sol-III is finally moving into the stage where it will begin paying off. As you can see from this latest message (attached below), the locals are starting to figure out that their planet is habitible because we gave them a moon of reasonable size. Pretty soon, they'll work out the interplanetary space drive and the cultural embargoes will expire; I give it less than one local year after they get off-world, and they'll be easy pickings for our marketing division. They'll be in hock to us for the rest of all eternity!
I remember how expensive it was to bust up that fifth rocky planet so we could have something to throw at Sol-III, but that nickle & iron core was perfect for the job. It knocked all the light silicates into orbit, and when they coalesced into Sol-III's moon, it was heavy enough to keep the primary's core molten through tidal action, light enough to solidify completely without a liquid core of its own.
True, it's been pretty time-consuming waiting around for semi-intelligent tool users to develop from the primordial life we seeded down there, but as I've said all along, just think how long we'd have had to wait without all of the intelligent designing we've done over the years. It's slower, but still cheaper to grow up our own customers than trying to find naturally occurring ones. You know how incredibly rare habitable planets are in this galaxy. What a dump!
Anyway, it shouldn't be much more than another 600 years, local time, before they get off-world and we can start to really exploit them. The first job will be to get them to do the terraforming of Sol-II. Trust me on this one - they'll work for peanuts.
Cheers,
Lesq
You'd have to bring a heck of a lot of hydrogen from somewhere else
Reproduce the creation of our own moon by throwing Pluto at Venus. Any off-center hit will plow Pluto's mass of rock and ice into Venus' crust, vaporizing a good chunk of it and imparting a huge spin to the remaining planetary mass. Granted, that's not enough hydrogen yet, but any system capable of moving Pluto should surely be capable of tossing around other substantial icy bodies.
(from where and at what cost?)
Nuclear powered ion thrusters, shooting ionized hydrogen and oxygen from Pluto's surface. If you can get Pluto moving inward in the first place, the sun's gravity will give you a lot of the extra energy you need to get a really good thwack upon impact with Venus. No doubt, this would be a long, difficult, expensive proposition, but not impossible.
_and_ give it a good spin (with what energy and just how?)
See step #1. The energy comes from the acceleration of Pluto dropping into the sun's gravity well.
_and_ somehow start some plate tectonics mechanism to get the convection currents going in the planet and start its dynamo
See step #1. Melting the planet's surface will make it much amenable to taking a spin.
Let the impact blow away most of the atmosphere, and follow the Pluto hit with a chain of large icy bodies. The vaporized crustal material will either fall back into the surface, which will keep churning the surface up, or it will coalesce in orbit to form a moon, and the tidal interactions will do much the same.
get rid of all that carbon in the atmosphere or all the water will just boil off.
Once you have water, it will get locked up in solid carbonates.
No problem.
If the collimated beam going into the plasma chamber gained a bunch of energy (42GeV) in the space of 84cm, that means total time of flight in the chamber was in the nanosecond range. That means a jillion collisions with the plasma. Wouldn't this screw up the focus of the beam? Sure, you've got a more powerful pulse of electrons coming out, but they will be sprayed all over the place, so the amount of energy that you can put into your incoming target beam of positrons (or into a stationary target) is diluted, isn't it?
Even though I sing in a church choir, I don't listen to music much, and I don't own any kind of personal music player, except for my old Walkman, gathering dust in the back of a drawer somewhere. When I have the radio on in the car, it's either talk radio, a book on tape or a lecture on tape (currently 9 hours into a 15-hour seminar on Dante's "Comedia").
I'm very knowledgable about art, history, literature, science, religion, politics, cooking, gardening, hunting, woodworking, and a jillion other things. I like to learn about things that interest other people, and I like to talk about things that interest me. I can hold a conversation and engage in a discussion with someone who holds a different viewpoint, without being disagreeable or opinionated. I have a lot of interests, but music isn't one of them.
But because I don't listen to music, the most obvious middle ground is closed to me. I have no idea who any of the big music stars are these days, and do not recognize a hit tune when it is played for me. Even worse, when I say, "I don't listen to music.", it's assumed that I am a completely uninteresting shlub who's leisure hours are filled with TV sitcom reruns.
Ok, they knew as soon as they saw this subterranean chamber that it was a hobbit hole, because it wasn't a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat.
QED.
People laughed at me when I bought coastline in Kansas. Who'll be laughing last?
Actually, I think it's wonderful that Microsoft thinks so highly of Slashdot as a source of opinion leaders that they'd plant you here to address concerns and answer questions. You are wonderfully knowledgable about Vista and Office 2007, providing all sorts of useful information about how the Office 2007 fonts are designed, exactly how your old macros will be carried over, even minutia such as exactly how many pixels the MS-Ribbon(TM) will occupy.
I especially love how you end every post with some variation on "you are spreading FUD, drink the Kool Aid before you criticize it". It's really a novel approach.
You even provide a link to get the Kool Aid! How helpful you are!
So, I'm concerned about file incompatibility between Microsoft's old product and their new one, but you say I should rest easy, because Microsoft assures me that a downloadable add-on, which they will make available, will integrate perfectly with their old software, making it unnecessary for me to buy their new software.
Really?
This is the assurance that is intended to alleviate any fear, uncertainties or doubts?
Really?
In that case, I feel nothing but serene anticipation of the increased productivity I'll enjoy once my PHB gets Office 2007.
Here's the standard problem with Office upgrades:So, just like with the previous new versions, all of you with the "obsolete" version (say, Office 2003) won't be able to open the memo that the PHB just composed and sent out on his Shiny New Computer that came with Office 2007 pre-loaded. So, everybody has to "upgrade" to Office 2007, and buy new computers to run it.
So you will still be able to open and read the 10^9 documents created with older versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, so long as you don't need to have all of the formatting, fonts, macros or colors to stay the same. After all, if you couldn't open them at all, you'd dump Word in favor of WordPerfect.
So that makes this more of a shipping point?
I'd say that redesigning the money supply would qualify as an undue hardship imposed on the Federal government.
From TFA: But our study demonstrates the possibility that interbreeding contributed advantageous variants into the human gene pool that subsequently spread"
Actually, it probably introduced a bunch of disadvantageous variants, too, but they dissapeared from the population since they were, you guessed it, at a disadvantage.
Variation in the population is one of the drivers of evolution. The more variation, the more likelihood that some members of the population will be significantly more adept at survival and successful reproduction than other members. The most adept do the best, the least adept starve and die.
The devil take the hindmost, and up the ladder we go!
having your own trebuchet
AAAAAAHHH!!!! Military-grade weapons in civilian hands! Escalation! Arms race! Call the U.N.! Call China! Call Jimmy Carter! Somebody do something! AAAAHHHH!!!
Police report that this guy owns not just one, but several ax-handles! He's an ax-handle nut! I wish the ax-handle lobby would own up to the fact that these things are not just dangerous, but potentially DEADLY!
Effective ax-handle control legislation is long overdue! Think of the children!
Besides that wasn't the real reason to put a nuclear plant in a river or sea.
It's even more convenient if the island is near a major metropolitan area, based on a large, high-flow volume river, and almost three miles long.
Nethack
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Half Life
SimCity
Freecell
Boy, you don't know nothing!
Mighty Mouse is a cartoon.
Superman is a real guy. No way a cartoon could beat up a real guy.
Um, here's the relevant quote from TFA:
Marketing staff are a necessary evil. They are super important when there's not really much difference between your product and your competitors' (Pepsi vs. Coke, GM vs. Ford, Coors vs. Aquafina, etc.), but they are less important when there is. With the buzz about the Core2Duo chips, the sales staff doesn't need as much razzle dazzle from the marketers, so they're cutting that staff.
They'll probably tell the excess marketing staffers some story about a giant space goat, and put them on a spaceship, along with the telephone sanitizers.
This classification discussion is far from over ...
One of my former bosses had a solution for situations like this (i.e. when someone disagreed with him, or when he was trying to exceed his authority). He would simply shout, "End of discussion!" and leave the room. He saw that as decisive leadership.
So, listen up, jc42, Pluto is not a planet, and neither is the moon. End of discussion!