Code Complete by Steve McConnell discusses this. It is not your code, it is the company's code, the team's code. Some poor bastard will need to read this code five years from now.
All you need to do is to use for example astyle or uncrustify to automatically format all code, before it is even accepted for a code review. Correctly formatted code, by a computer, should be a prerequisite. If the code is not correctly formatted, call of the inspection/review and meet again at some other date.
No one that appeals to "consensus" has any scientific credibility. "On the word of no one", Nullius in verba, used to be the motto of the Royal Society. It is well hidden these days. It is not featured on the home page.
In the 19th century, the Royal Society received money from the British government. This created such a scandal that any further government funding was refused. It was judged scandalous that scientist could depend on government funding. This was during laissez-faire. The British government then bankrupted the universities during the First World War (they had their savings in government bonds). These days, the Royal Society is a stooge of British politicians. Since they are the ones paying.
Darwin was a hobby scientist. He was not peer reviewed. He did not work at a university. He did not publish papers. He wrote books.
Followingen the IPCC logic, I should have answered that "oh, but the whole physics department agrees with my statement" during the defence of my thesis...
I've done that. It turns out that he and his "sycophants", i.e. other contributors, use the scientific method of looking at the evidence.
On a personal note, I was uncommitted until I asked an innocent question on Little Green Footballs and was treated as "a denier", "a troll". Now, my PhD in physics has nothing to do with climatology, but one does not have to be a scientist to recognise "appeal to authority" as in "consensus". Galileo was condemned by the "consensus" of the time. "Einstein says...", "the IPCC writes..." or "the results have been peer reviewed" are not scientific arguments.
The term denier is commonly associated with the holocaust. In French the translation of "denier" is négationniste, and you can go to jail for that (no first amendment to protect you).
So, according to your definition, Watts is a climatologist, since he studies "long-term changes in averages of weather".
The kind of degree he has is a separate matter. Darwin did not have a PhD. Darwin did not publish his theory of evolution in a "peer reviewed journal". Darwin was self-financed and not employed by a reputable institution...
I guess these revelations prove that the theory of evolution is false..., But, hey, the Bible is not peer reviewed either. What to believe...
1 - He has published it, on the web, otherwise you would not be able to read it.
2 - Publishing something in a peer reviewed journal does not make something inherently better, or worse.
Peer review is not some kind of mystical spell that you cast on results to make them "scientific". Peer review simply means that peers, people working in the same fields as you, have gone over the results and agreed with them. Typically, two, to the author anonymous reviewers, go over the paper, after an editor has had a look to see that it is fit for the journal. You might be interested to know that neither Nature, nor Science practices such peer reviews. The editors of those journals accept or reject the papers themselves.
However, in any scientific field, there are only around 150 peers, Dunbar's number. When a field gets larger, it splits into several sub-disciplins. The big problem with the peer review system, both for results, and, very importantly for grant applications, is that all peers are in the same boat. So only results that generally agree with the field will be accepted. If a young brilliant scientist wants to publish results that show that the whole field is a dead loss, that there is no chance it will cure cancer and the like, he is unlikely to be published. He will not receive any grants for a proposal that sets out to prove that all of his peers should change profession, because the field is a dead end.
To fix the problems with peer review, we need competition. Independent funding from many different sources, and preferably none at all from governments. Terence Kealey discusses in a couple of books the empirical fact that for civilian research, for every dollar that the government provides, 1.25 dollars of private money disappears.
I must confess that I have only briefly looked at the convention. What I wrote was what our captain told us in 1984, quite officially, so that would be the Swedish official point of view.
To me, the finer points of the convention are the kind of stuff that lawyers and judges in peace time give a "sitting in my library" kind of interpretation. If they personally felt that vital interests were threatened, or felt to be threatened themselves, they would look at it in another way. That the US has several times as many lawyers per inhabitant than almost any other nation on earth is most likely also a reason.
In WWII, the soldiers were "us" to the US public, all 12 million of them. Now, ever since the Vietnam war, it is "them" to the left. It is a bit as if the Americans would support the Ukraine in the Hockey World championships.
The perspectives and interpretations of the finer points of laws also changes when you are faced with opponents that do not follow any conventions. My father was at the head of a small brewery. As such he had a role in civil defense (food industry). As with Swedish fighter pilots, our home was visited by Polish "art salesmen" trying to sell paintings. This was to have a look at the house so that in case of a war (where Sweden as we now know was a Soviet first strike target), key personnel could the assassinated by the Spetznas. This was in the early eighties.
The script that Bush I and II were following for Iraq was written by Churchill. "How to deal with a dictator before the threat becomes large". The Gathering Storm is highly recommended.
I am quite impress with the restraint shown by the pilots. If one compares with normal behaviour from previous wars, WWI,WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the standard mode of operation would have been to assume that anyone stupid enough to stick their head out was a legitimate target. Today's Russians would have flattened the whole block.
What is sad is that the sense that the US soldiers are on our side (I am Swedish, and I am upset that there were no Swedish troops sharing the burden of Western civilization with the US).
US journalists were on the US side in WWII, something they were not in Vietnam according to Reagan. I can't remember reading any complaints about US journalists not being embedded with the Germans during WWII to get the true picture...
I did 15 months military service in the Swedish army, so I have no experience of an actual war. But I do know that if people are firing around you, it makes a hell of a racket. When you fire certain weapons, such as rocket propelled grenades, you keep your mouth open to avoid splitting your ear drums. With American troops embedded in bases all over Baghdad (this was 2007) and fighting going on regularly, the default attitude should be caution. We know from other reports, that fighting was going on in the vicinity of where the journalists, and their insurgent group were killed.
Based on this, if I lived in the neighbourhood, I would put my family in the most secure room of the house. If I had my young children in a car, I would stop and take shelter. I would not continue driving around.
As for fighting in built-up areas, well war is hell. In Caen, the allies flattened the whole town, beginning when there were 60 000 people living there. At the end there were still 17 000 people in the town. You have to fight the enemy where he happens to be. Do you suggest the US troops should have dropped leaflets and invited the insurgents to slug it out in the open? Please be so kind as to join us in a firefight on the shooting range...
Suppose, said our captain, that you are a civilian. You hear the Soviets approaching and you grab your hunting rifle, put a little yellow and blue armband on and attack them. In that case, as you are not in uniform and not part of a recognised military unit, according to the laws of war, the Soviets are in their full right to put you up against a wall and shoot you on the spot. Don't do it.
Yes. I assume that they drove up to collect the bodies to prevent intelligence gathering by the US. Anyone with the smallest brain would otherwise stay way clear. If they saw the bodies at a distance, if they had good intentions, they would have stopped the van and reversed the hell out of there.
No, alone. The guys in the apache, based on the video, did their job correctly. If you have ever been a soldier, or you simply use your imagination, you would understand. In a war, there are two sides trying to outwit one another. People do get killed on both sides, and innocent bystanders may also be killed.
Anyone who has good intentions knows to be very careful when there is a firefight in the neighbourhood, as part of an ongoing war.
Have a look at the wikipedia entry for the battle for Caen for a comparison.
For hiking with "insurgents" (the enemy) with something that at a distance looks like an RPG (it still looks like one to me), whilst other "insurgents" nearby are involved in a firefight with US troops, and with helicopter gunships above, these journalists should get Darwin awards for removing themselves from the gene pool.
The people who then decided to put two children in a van to collect the bodies should be shot if they survived. It should go without saying that the US troops would want to examine the bodies of the dead enemy, to see who they were, if there were any documents on them, etc. Every army in the world would do that. And anyone in the "insurgency" would be criminally stupid not to know that.
The Germans had no American embed journalists on D-Day in 1944. The Americans and the British bombed Caen to smithereens. Thousands of French died as "collateral damage". Should the Allied have refrained from going into France, against the express will of the Vichy government? Should they have refrained from invading Germany because it was "their country"? And should the New York Times have published the invasion plans for D-Day because "the public has the right to know"?
Amen to that. Go read Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister. They have some data on this. What one has to remember is that "feeling creative" is not the same as "being creative".
It takes 15 minutes to enter the creative state of flow. 10 five minute phone calls per day and people will have lost 200 minutes. Per day. Turn off the phone, msn, stop bothering people unnecessarily and get to work.
This is why people come in at 6 to get 3 hours of actual work done before the managers arrive to start prattling, and this is why some work until 11 at night.
I actually did a PhD in physics in an unrelated area. However, one does learn a few things. For example that a PhD is not a license to state that you are right. Appealing to authority is just about as anti-science as you can get.
"You have not published a paper in a peer reviewed journal" is not a valid argument.
Peer reviewing is there to help with weeding out as much BS as possible. However, good insights can come from anyone.
Finally, what you do hone as an Engineering student and a PhD is your BS detector, and that is all that it takes to make a valid contribution. All of these sites are criticizing what others have done. Of course, that is a lot easier than publishing original new work. However, getting proof that something isn't correct is also a worthwhile contribution. One single falsification (go and read your Popper) is all that it takes to invalidate a theory.
Steve McIntyre actually tried to go much further than this. He wanted to review the data and reanalyse it. Had he been allowed to do so, and actually reproduced the results, that would have been as scientific a contribution as I can think of.
Unfortunately, he was refused access to said data.
My experience is somewhat similar. I have always been skeptical in the sense that I cannot see what we can do about the problem other than adjust to it, at least for the next 100 years.
However, the treatment I got at littlegreenfootballs reminds me of fundamentalist Christians wanting to "talk to me about Jesus".
Wattsuppwiththat really rocks as a site, so do noconsensus, climateaudit and climateskeptic.
"Aerobic exercise" it says in the TA. Why not to the thing properly? 500 kCal per day, maximum 70% heart rate... Was this the "old ladies of both sexes" method of exercise?
For starters, they should have walked to the sports centre. It is unfortunately a sad world we live in. My father in-law once ran a major sports centre in the UK. He tells me that the most important aspect of success is to have the parking lot just in front of the entrance.
These people went from doing no exercise it would appear, to performing a tiny amount of exercise. I am certain that had they added:
"Walk 3 km (2 miles for part the world) to the sport centre, do your little thing, walk 3 km to get back home afterwards. Walk to work, walk back from work."
the results would have been more impressive.
Obligatory schooling was introduced in my native Sweden in 1842. It was then decided that school should start at 7. Not because of the maturity of the children, but because it was decided that a 7-year old can walk, alone, 3 km to school, and 3 km back. This would be too much for a 6-year old. Therefore, by starting school at 7, much fewer school buildings would need to be constructed.
Note to UK readers:
The frequency of paedophilia was most likely just as large as it is now. People, for some reason, decided not to introduce a police state at the same time though. Maybe their risk assessments were a bit more realistic in those times.
Bollocks. The US could build rockets if it wanted to. The US used to spend 6% of GDP on the military during the cold war. Britain spend 50% of GDP on the military during the second world war. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are small drops in the ocean compared to such ventures.
Also, remove 100 billion $ from the trial lawyers.
And drill, baby, drill!
It could also have done as Harding did in 1920-21 recession. He cut the budget in half between 1920-22. And the national debt by 1/3. The result turned out to be the roaring 20-ies. The recession disappeared so quickly that nobody remembers it now.
It is really sad that nuclear rockets were abandoned when the space race was won by the US against the Russians.
Nuclear rockets consist of a reactor that heats hydrogen that is accelerated.
A nuclear rocket would take 3 months to get to mars, 3 months back. Back in 1970, 400 M $ were missing to get the first one off the ground as a third stage of an Apollo rocket.
The theoretical useful weight for a nuclear rocket is 38% of the total that can go up in space, compared to 4% for a chemical rocket.
Nerva-2 would have developped 5000 MW and 90 tonnes of lift. Nerva-1 had already been tested on the ground. 1100 MW and 25 ton lift.
As soon as the Chinese threaten to do this, the US might be back in the race. One can always hope.
The plan in the early 1970ies was to send two of these off to Mars (for obvious redundancy purposes).
Unfortunately, there are no "exact specifications" in the real world. As the reviewer, I thoroughly recommend reading Weinberg (Quality Software Management), but also Tom Gilb, "Principles...".
Funnily enough, Craig Larman points out that the guy accused of inventing the Waterfall model did no such thing. According to his son, he has been misquoted for 30+ years.
If global warming does exist, which I do believe to some extent, it will still most likely to move a few hundred million people than to reduce carbon emissions by say 2/3, which might be what we need to do to save these islands. (Not so long ago, people did not live along the US cost line because it was too dangerous.)
If the planet has been heating up during all of the 20th century, and this is due to human CO2 emissions, then we most likely need to go back to the emission levels of 1850 to get rid of GW. What were they? 1/10 or 1/20 of the current ones?
This will need quite a few nuclear reactors, solar panels + most of us will go to work by bicycle.
All of these animals were most likely hunted to extinction of what I assume should be called "native americans" (my PC speak is not up to scratch). If that is natural or not, you be the judge. The same thing happened on New Zealand around 1200 AD, and on Madagascar around 1400 AD. It quite possibly happened in Australia as well. Traditional societies living close to nature are quite capable to root out animals. Finally, that is what happened to the wooly mammoth as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Code Complete by Steve McConnell discusses this. It is not your code, it is the company's code, the team's code. Some poor bastard will need to read this code five years from now. All you need to do is to use for example astyle or uncrustify to automatically format all code, before it is even accepted for a code review. Correctly formatted code, by a computer, should be a prerequisite. If the code is not correctly formatted, call of the inspection/review and meet again at some other date.
No one that appeals to "consensus" has any scientific credibility. "On the word of no one", Nullius in verba, used to be the motto of the Royal Society. It is well hidden these days. It is not featured on the home page. In the 19th century, the Royal Society received money from the British government. This created such a scandal that any further government funding was refused. It was judged scandalous that scientist could depend on government funding. This was during laissez-faire. The British government then bankrupted the universities during the First World War (they had their savings in government bonds). These days, the Royal Society is a stooge of British politicians. Since they are the ones paying. Darwin was a hobby scientist. He was not peer reviewed. He did not work at a university. He did not publish papers. He wrote books. Followingen the IPCC logic, I should have answered that "oh, but the whole physics department agrees with my statement" during the defence of my thesis...
I've done that. It turns out that he and his "sycophants", i.e. other contributors, use the scientific method of looking at the evidence.
On a personal note, I was uncommitted until I asked an innocent question on Little Green Footballs and was treated as "a denier", "a troll". Now, my PhD in physics has nothing to do with climatology, but one does not have to be a scientist to recognise "appeal to authority" as in "consensus". Galileo was condemned by the "consensus" of the time. "Einstein says...", "the IPCC writes..." or "the results have been peer reviewed" are not scientific arguments.
The term denier is commonly associated with the holocaust. In French the translation of "denier" is négationniste, and you can go to jail for that (no first amendment to protect you).
Hear, hear.
So, according to your definition, Watts is a climatologist, since he studies "long-term changes in averages of weather".
The kind of degree he has is a separate matter. Darwin did not have a PhD. Darwin did not publish his theory of evolution in a "peer reviewed journal". Darwin was self-financed and not employed by a reputable institution...
I guess these revelations prove that the theory of evolution is false..., But, hey, the Bible is not peer reviewed either. What to believe...
A few comments:
1 - He has published it, on the web, otherwise you would not be able to read it.
2 - Publishing something in a peer reviewed journal does not make something inherently better, or worse.
Peer review is not some kind of mystical spell that you cast on results to make them "scientific". Peer review simply means that peers, people working in the same fields as you, have gone over the results and agreed with them. Typically, two, to the author anonymous reviewers, go over the paper, after an editor has had a look to see that it is fit for the journal. You might be interested to know that neither Nature, nor Science practices such peer reviews. The editors of those journals accept or reject the papers themselves.
However, in any scientific field, there are only around 150 peers, Dunbar's number. When a field gets larger, it splits into several sub-disciplins. The big problem with the peer review system, both for results, and, very importantly for grant applications, is that all peers are in the same boat. So only results that generally agree with the field will be accepted. If a young brilliant scientist wants to publish results that show that the whole field is a dead loss, that there is no chance it will cure cancer and the like, he is unlikely to be published. He will not receive any grants for a proposal that sets out to prove that all of his peers should change profession, because the field is a dead end.
To fix the problems with peer review, we need competition. Independent funding from many different sources, and preferably none at all from governments. Terence Kealey discusses in a couple of books the empirical fact that for civilian research, for every dollar that the government provides, 1.25 dollars of private money disappears.
I must confess that I have only briefly looked at the convention. What I wrote was what our captain told us in 1984, quite officially, so that would be the Swedish official point of view.
To me, the finer points of the convention are the kind of stuff that lawyers and judges in peace time give a "sitting in my library" kind of interpretation. If they personally felt that vital interests were threatened, or felt to be threatened themselves, they would look at it in another way. That the US has several times as many lawyers per inhabitant than almost any other nation on earth is most likely also a reason.
In WWII, the soldiers were "us" to the US public, all 12 million of them. Now, ever since the Vietnam war, it is "them" to the left. It is a bit as if the Americans would support the Ukraine in the Hockey World championships.
The perspectives and interpretations of the finer points of laws also changes when you are faced with opponents that do not follow any conventions. My father was at the head of a small brewery. As such he had a role in civil defense (food industry). As with Swedish fighter pilots, our home was visited by Polish "art salesmen" trying to sell paintings. This was to have a look at the house so that in case of a war (where Sweden as we now know was a Soviet first strike target), key personnel could the assassinated by the Spetznas. This was in the early eighties.
The script that Bush I and II were following for Iraq was written by Churchill. "How to deal with a dictator before the threat becomes large". The Gathering Storm is highly recommended.
http://www.amazon.com/Second-World-War-Gathering-Storm/dp/039541055X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276066898&sr=1-3
And I will take time to look at the Geneva conventions.
I am quite impress with the restraint shown by the pilots. If one compares with normal behaviour from previous wars, WWI,WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the standard mode of operation would have been to assume that anyone stupid enough to stick their head out was a legitimate target. Today's Russians would have flattened the whole block.
What is sad is that the sense that the US soldiers are on our side (I am Swedish, and I am upset that there were no Swedish troops sharing the burden of Western civilization with the US).
US journalists were on the US side in WWII, something they were not in Vietnam according to Reagan. I can't remember reading any complaints about US journalists not being embedded with the Germans during WWII to get the true picture...
I did 15 months military service in the Swedish army, so I have no experience of an actual war. But I do know that if people are firing around you, it makes a hell of a racket. When you fire certain weapons, such as rocket propelled grenades, you keep your mouth open to avoid splitting your ear drums. With American troops embedded in bases all over Baghdad (this was 2007) and fighting going on regularly, the default attitude should be caution. We know from other reports, that fighting was going on in the vicinity of where the journalists, and their insurgent group were killed.
Based on this, if I lived in the neighbourhood, I would put my family in the most secure room of the house. If I had my young children in a car, I would stop and take shelter. I would not continue driving around.
As for fighting in built-up areas, well war is hell. In Caen, the allies flattened the whole town, beginning when there were 60 000 people living there. At the end there were still 17 000 people in the town. You have to fight the enemy where he happens to be. Do you suggest the US troops should have dropped leaflets and invited the insurgents to slug it out in the open? Please be so kind as to join us in a firefight on the shooting range...
Suppose, said our captain, that you are a civilian. You hear the Soviets approaching and you grab your hunting rifle, put a little yellow and blue armband on and attack them. In that case, as you are not in uniform and not part of a recognised military unit, according to the laws of war, the Soviets are in their full right to put you up against a wall and shoot you on the spot. Don't do it.
Yes. I assume that they drove up to collect the bodies to prevent intelligence gathering by the US. Anyone with the smallest brain would otherwise stay way clear. If they saw the bodies at a distance, if they had good intentions, they would have stopped the van and reversed the hell out of there.
No, alone. The guys in the apache, based on the video, did their job correctly. If you have ever been a soldier, or you simply use your imagination, you would understand. In a war, there are two sides trying to outwit one another. People do get killed on both sides, and innocent bystanders may also be killed.
Anyone who has good intentions knows to be very careful when there is a firefight in the neighbourhood, as part of an ongoing war.
Have a look at the wikipedia entry for the battle for Caen for a comparison.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Caen
They finished rebuilding that town in 1962, 18 years after D-Day.
Amen to that.
For hiking with "insurgents" (the enemy) with something that at a distance looks like an RPG (it still looks like one to me), whilst other "insurgents" nearby are involved in a firefight with US troops, and with helicopter gunships above, these journalists should get Darwin awards for removing themselves from the gene pool.
The people who then decided to put two children in a van to collect the bodies should be shot if they survived. It should go without saying that the US troops would want to examine the bodies of the dead enemy, to see who they were, if there were any documents on them, etc. Every army in the world would do that. And anyone in the "insurgency" would be criminally stupid not to know that.
The Germans had no American embed journalists on D-Day in 1944. The Americans and the British bombed Caen to smithereens. Thousands of French died as "collateral damage". Should the Allied have refrained from going into France, against the express will of the Vichy government? Should they have refrained from invading Germany because it was "their country"? And should the New York Times have published the invasion plans for D-Day because "the public has the right to know"?
Amen to that. Go read Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister. They have some data on this. What one has to remember is that "feeling creative" is not the same as "being creative".
It takes 15 minutes to enter the creative state of flow. 10 five minute phone calls per day and people will have lost 200 minutes. Per day. Turn off the phone, msn, stop bothering people unnecessarily and get to work.
This is why people come in at 6 to get 3 hours of actual work done before the managers arrive to start prattling, and this is why some work until 11 at night.
I actually did a PhD in physics in an unrelated area. However, one does learn a few things. For example that a PhD is not a license to state that you are right. Appealing to authority is just about as anti-science as you can get.
"You have not published a paper in a peer reviewed journal" is not a valid argument.
Peer reviewing is there to help with weeding out as much BS as possible. However, good insights can come from anyone.
Finally, what you do hone as an Engineering student and a PhD is your BS detector, and that is all that it takes to make a valid contribution. All of these sites are criticizing what others have done. Of course, that is a lot easier than publishing original new work. However, getting proof that something isn't correct is also a worthwhile contribution. One single falsification (go and read your Popper) is all that it takes to invalidate a theory.
Steve McIntyre actually tried to go much further than this. He wanted to review the data and reanalyse it. Had he been allowed to do so, and actually reproduced the results, that would have been as scientific a contribution as I can think of.
Unfortunately, he was refused access to said data.
2500 scientists who worked over 6 years... It almost sounds like the Manhattan project. Here is analysis ot what was done:
http://climaterealist.blogspot.com/2008/09/ipcc-2500-scientists-myth.html
My experience is somewhat similar. I have always been skeptical in the sense that I cannot see what we can do about the problem other than adjust to it, at least for the next 100 years. However, the treatment I got at littlegreenfootballs reminds me of fundamentalist Christians wanting to "talk to me about Jesus". Wattsuppwiththat really rocks as a site, so do noconsensus, climateaudit and climateskeptic.
"Aerobic exercise" it says in the TA. Why not to the thing properly? 500 kCal per day, maximum 70% heart rate... Was this the "old ladies of both sexes" method of exercise?
For starters, they should have walked to the sports centre. It is unfortunately a sad world we live in. My father in-law once ran a major sports centre in the UK. He tells me that the most important aspect of success is to have the parking lot just in front of the entrance.
These people went from doing no exercise it would appear, to performing a tiny amount of exercise. I am certain that had they added:
"Walk 3 km (2 miles for part the world) to the sport centre, do your little thing, walk 3 km to get back home afterwards. Walk to work, walk back from work."
the results would have been more impressive.
Obligatory schooling was introduced in my native Sweden in 1842. It was then decided that school should start at 7. Not because of the maturity of the children, but because it was decided that a 7-year old can walk, alone, 3 km to school, and 3 km back. This would be too much for a 6-year old. Therefore, by starting school at 7, much fewer school buildings would need to be constructed.
Note to UK readers:
The frequency of paedophilia was most likely just as large as it is now. People, for some reason, decided not to introduce a police state at the same time though. Maybe their risk assessments were a bit more realistic in those times.
Bollocks. The US could build rockets if it wanted to. The US used to spend 6% of GDP on the military during the cold war. Britain spend 50% of GDP on the military during the second world war.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are small drops in the ocean compared to such ventures.
Also, remove 100 billion $ from the trial lawyers.
And drill, baby, drill!
It could also have done as Harding did in 1920-21 recession. He cut the budget in half between 1920-22. And the national debt by 1/3. The result turned out to be the roaring 20-ies. The recession disappeared so quickly that nobody remembers it now.
http://ezinearticles.com/?Warren-G-Harding-and-the-1920-Depression---Learning-the-Right-Lesson&id=3121606
During the space race, 400 000 people in the US worked on the Apollo project.
It is really sad that nuclear rockets were abandoned when the space race was won by the US against the Russians. Nuclear rockets consist of a reactor that heats hydrogen that is accelerated.
A nuclear rocket would take 3 months to get to mars, 3 months back. Back in 1970, 400 M $ were missing to get the first one off the ground as a third stage of an Apollo rocket.
The theoretical useful weight for a nuclear rocket is 38% of the total that can go up in space, compared to 4% for a chemical rocket.
Nerva-2 would have developped 5000 MW and 90 tonnes of lift. Nerva-1 had already been tested on the ground. 1100 MW and 25 ton lift.
As soon as the Chinese threaten to do this, the US might be back in the race. One can always hope.
The plan in the early 1970ies was to send two of these off to Mars (for obvious redundancy purposes).
Unfortunately, there are no "exact specifications" in the real world. As the reviewer, I thoroughly recommend reading Weinberg (Quality Software Management), but also Tom Gilb, "Principles...". Funnily enough, Craig Larman points out that the guy accused of inventing the Waterfall model did no such thing. According to his son, he has been misquoted for 30+ years.
If global warming does exist, which I do believe to some extent, it will still most likely to move a few hundred million people than to reduce carbon emissions by say 2/3, which might be what we need to do to save these islands. (Not so long ago, people did not live along the US cost line because it was too dangerous.)
If the planet has been heating up during all of the 20th century, and this is due to human CO2 emissions, then we most likely need to go back to the emission levels of 1850 to get rid of GW. What were they? 1/10 or 1/20 of the current ones?
This will need quite a few nuclear reactors, solar panels + most of us will go to work by bicycle.
(I actually prefer riding a bike to work.)
Erik
Please mod parent up. He is raising a very important point about liberty and the freedom of speech.
All of these animals were most likely hunted to extinction of what I assume should be called "native americans" (my PC speak is not up to scratch). If that is natural or not, you be the judge.
The same thing happened on New Zealand around 1200 AD, and on Madagascar around 1400 AD. It quite possibly happened in Australia as well.
Traditional societies living close to nature are quite capable to root out animals.
Finally, that is what happened to the wooly mammoth as well.