The other thing burying your habitat does is protect it from landing craft. The rocket exhaust from them tends to throw any loose dust around at high velocity. Even if you pave the landing pad itself, there will be loose dust around that.
I would think that the only limitation to the amount of space you can carve out would be limited by the mean time between failures rather than not having enough high density building material.
Energy would be a limitation too. Your digger would need to be nuclear-powered (or come with solar panels attached by a really long extension cord).
In anybody's USA, actually. That sort of obligation was supposed to be what the public got in return for limiting corporate liability in the first place!
SOPA and PIPA are just part of the ongoing battle between the authoritarians and the libertarians.
Its not that simple, and never has been much of an ideological battle along traditional party lines. This is a money grab, pure and simple.
I don't understand why you think the GP was talking about "party lines." It is an ongoing battle between authoritarians and libertarians, but both the Democrats and Republicans are authoritarian so they both support it. (This is also, by the way, why so many folks feel disenfranchised or that neither party represents them.)
Perhaps we should all declare the value of these things stolen from the Public Domain as a loss when we file our income taxes, and fight it in court again from that perspective.
...even the mention of a simple brand name could be enough cause to convince a US judge to get a domain name blacklisted...
Huh? What judge? With SOPA & PIPA, there's no due process to follow or judge to convince; the bully companies get to play judge, jury and executioner themselves!
Incidentally, half of these I hadn't even heard of before today; I only know of them now because they chose to protest SOPA! Also, Penny Arcade isn't blacked out but has an anti-SOPA banner, and XKCD hasn't updated yet.
By the way, I ignored it by considering only a single year, but what I really calculated was the average strain rate, with units 1 / year (i.e., the answer is really 1.2*10^-9 year^-1). Weird, eh?
"Strain" is expressed as length divided by length (e.g. in/in). In other words, it's a dimensionless ratio. Here's how we calculate it for this situation:
The length (actually width) of New Mexico is about 343 miles, which is 21,732,480 inches:
L = 2.1*10^7 inch
In a year it stretches 1/40 of an inch (on average):
dL = 2.5*10^-2 inch
Therefore the strain, dL/L is:
dL/L = 2.5*10^-2 inch / 2.1*10^7 inch = 1.2*10^-9
Voila: the inches cancel and you get 1.2 dimensionless "nanostrains."
My wild, completely uninformed guess is that life originated multiple times, and each subsequent new instance got immediately eaten by the (by then more evolved) first one.
Really, everyone acts like Citizens United was a front group for some giant corporation. They were just a bunch of folks who got together to pool their money to create a documentary about a candidate. People should be able to do this.
First, the GP's post appears to have been citing the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, not referring to the group itself. (You can tell by the italics.)
Second, while the particular thing Citizens United wanted to do might be reasonable (and I don't know enough to take a position on that), the consequences of the Citizens United decision are terrible. Even without researching their circumstances, I'm convinced that prohibiting them would have easily been an acceptable loss in return for avoiding giving free speech to corporations.
Forgive my ignorance, but what would using the same profile have to do with anything? It doesn't accumulate cruft like the Windows Registry or something, does it?
Either that, or the management wants to be picky and doesn't acknowledge their responsibility to do on-the-job training, or the whole thing is a charade to give an excuse to hire H1B slave labor.
The grandparent post wasn't talking about a minimum wage, he was talking about guaranteed working conditions. Things like not allowing 16-hour shifts, for instance -- which, by the way, would increase employment because companies would have to hire more working instead of whipping the existing ones to death.
Convince businesses to get over this stupid obsession of having offices in central london (or other large cities), it doesn't make your company look prestigious it just increases costs and hinders your recruitment process because people are put off by the horrendous commute and will usually demand more money for working there. Instead, build your offices in small business parks located outside the centre of cities, not only are these considerably cheaper but there is generally affordable housing within a short distance. I personally have turned down several job offers that required commuting to central london.
The problem with this idea is that everyone ends up living and working in different suburbs, which means that half the folks that used to commute to the city center now commute through it and out the other side, while the other half clog up the roads that were supposed to be bypasses so that they're just as horrendous as the city center commute was to begin with.
Oh, and by the way: once you've developed this ridiculous gridlock, you can no longer even solve it with a cost-effective hub-and-spoke public transit system. Why? Because not only do you now need to have trains going from every point to every other point to avoid excessive transfers, but none of these business parks have enough density to make them cost-effective!
And if you doubt me, let me point out that I know this from experience: I live in Atlanta. Even though we have a metro area population only about 40% of London's, the highways both around and through the city are as wide or wider, on average, than the widest part of the M25 and even then they still become parking lots during rush hour (which, by the way, actually lasts for about 3 hours each in the morning and evening, plus an hour at lunchtime).
Unfortunately, it also tends to be short term and/or variable rate, which means that it's effectively indexed to inflation and thus the inflation won't do them any good.
Inflation is great for young middle-class folks like me, though, with a bunch of low-fixed-interest-rate debt (assuming pay rates keep up, anyway...).
Slashdot Mirror
Make the landing pad slightly bowl-shaped.
Energy would be a limitation too. Your digger would need to be nuclear-powered (or come with solar panels attached by a really long extension cord).
Sucks for the folks who bought 120Hz TVs in an attempt to eliminate telecine judder; now they'll have to upgrade to 240Hz.
In anybody's USA, actually. That sort of obligation was supposed to be what the public got in return for limiting corporate liability in the first place!
I don't understand why you think the GP was talking about "party lines." It is an ongoing battle between authoritarians and libertarians, but both the Democrats and Republicans are authoritarian so they both support it. (This is also, by the way, why so many folks feel disenfranchised or that neither party represents them.)
The Hell it isn't!
Perhaps we should all declare the value of these things stolen from the Public Domain as a loss when we file our income taxes, and fight it in court again from that perspective.
Huh? What judge? With SOPA & PIPA, there's no due process to follow or judge to convince; the bully companies get to play judge, jury and executioner themselves!
Here are some blacked-out webcomics:
Incidentally, half of these I hadn't even heard of before today; I only know of them now because they chose to protest SOPA! Also, Penny Arcade isn't blacked out but has an anti-SOPA banner, and XKCD hasn't updated yet.
By the way, I ignored it by considering only a single year, but what I really calculated was the average strain rate, with units 1 / year (i.e., the answer is really 1.2*10^-9 year^-1). Weird, eh?
"Strain" is expressed as length divided by length (e.g. in/in). In other words, it's a dimensionless ratio. Here's how we calculate it for this situation:
The length (actually width) of New Mexico is about 343 miles, which is 21,732,480 inches:
L = 2.1*10^7 inch
In a year it stretches 1/40 of an inch (on average):
dL = 2.5*10^-2 inch
Therefore the strain, dL/L is:
dL/L = 2.5*10^-2 inch / 2.1*10^7 inch = 1.2*10^-9
Voila: the inches cancel and you get 1.2 dimensionless "nanostrains."
My wild, completely uninformed guess is that life originated multiple times, and each subsequent new instance got immediately eaten by the (by then more evolved) first one.
This would be slightly more on-topic in a SOPA thread, but your mention of restricting compilers makes it relevant:
The Right to Read
First, the GP's post appears to have been citing the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, not referring to the group itself. (You can tell by the italics.)
Second, while the particular thing Citizens United wanted to do might be reasonable (and I don't know enough to take a position on that), the consequences of the Citizens United decision are terrible. Even without researching their circumstances, I'm convinced that prohibiting them would have easily been an acceptable loss in return for avoiding giving free speech to corporations.
Forgive my ignorance, but what would using the same profile have to do with anything? It doesn't accumulate cruft like the Windows Registry or something, does it?
Pro tip: subscribers get to see stories ahead of time. You don't have to be a shill to write a long first post.
Some people do, but they're idiots.
Unless it also doesn't include the fractions used to make Diesel, kerosene, or jet fuel, it would still make more sense to use it as fuel directly.
There's no reason you couldn't get the ethylene somewhere else, of course (for example, it's released by ripening fruit).
Either that, or the management wants to be picky and doesn't acknowledge their responsibility to do on-the-job training, or the whole thing is a charade to give an excuse to hire H1B slave labor.
No it doesn't.
The grandparent post wasn't talking about a minimum wage, he was talking about guaranteed working conditions. Things like not allowing 16-hour shifts, for instance -- which, by the way, would increase employment because companies would have to hire more working instead of whipping the existing ones to death.
Why not go to a 4x10 schedule and give every employee every Friday off?
The problem with this idea is that everyone ends up living and working in different suburbs, which means that half the folks that used to commute to the city center now commute through it and out the other side, while the other half clog up the roads that were supposed to be bypasses so that they're just as horrendous as the city center commute was to begin with.
Oh, and by the way: once you've developed this ridiculous gridlock, you can no longer even solve it with a cost-effective hub-and-spoke public transit system. Why? Because not only do you now need to have trains going from every point to every other point to avoid excessive transfers, but none of these business parks have enough density to make them cost-effective!
And if you doubt me, let me point out that I know this from experience: I live in Atlanta. Even though we have a metro area population only about 40% of London's, the highways both around and through the city are as wide or wider, on average, than the widest part of the M25 and even then they still become parking lots during rush hour (which, by the way, actually lasts for about 3 hours each in the morning and evening, plus an hour at lunchtime).
Trust me, you don't want our solution.
Unfortunately, it also tends to be short term and/or variable rate, which means that it's effectively indexed to inflation and thus the inflation won't do them any good.
Inflation is great for young middle-class folks like me, though, with a bunch of low-fixed-interest-rate debt (assuming pay rates keep up, anyway...).