Oh Great, now I've set off the conditions allowing for an avalanche of "dead baby" jokes.

Absolutely agree. The reason to use greek with greek and not latin is for consistancy, but it sometimes happens that they get mixed in english words anyway. It is, afterall, neither latin or greek, but merely english.

See now, that's one use I never thought of...

And Daniel Staal's idea (http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1957378&cid=34930046) of this leading to a closed resource loop really makes this hard core sci-fi stuff.

So this could potentially lead to colonising Mars or other planets

I'm glad there are others out there who understand the question: "of what use is a baby"?

Prior art.

I'm usually one for going to the source rather than a third party, but the Wikipedia article includes a link to the RFC fairly early on, and has a lot of additional information that was quite enlightening. (For instance, the link to "Victorian Internet" in the see also links.)

I think it was a good thing that the Wikipedia article was linked.

About the only bad thing about going to Wikipedia first was that you got the joke explained to you before you got a chance to experience the ah-ha moment (if you didn't already know what IPoAC was).

...woosh? You do realise he's talking about plants and gardening, don't you?

But by creating syngas, this process also "frees up fossil fuels". I see this being used IN ADDITION TO new solar plants.

The summary covers a lot of it, but this is pretty fascinating (if it reaches production): something that can be added to the exhaust of a fossil fuel power generation station that reduces the carbon footprint and provides fuel to use in either that or other processes in addition to supplying oxygen for other processes. All it really takes is concentrated sunlight for an energy source.

I'd be interested to see in a few years what other uses are figured out for it.

We live in interesting times...

Because "graphy", "thermal", and "tectonic" are greek suffixes.

However, for the heat engine pole encircling tube thing to work, it doesn't matter which 'side' of the moon is dark or at what time. It's a continuous loop.

Of course, would it be worth it considering the scale of creating a tube large enough to encircle the pole of a small planetoid?

Those are some badass anecdotes.

If the only force dark matter reacts to is gravity, wouldn't it all coalesce into one big lump? There must be some other force affecting it.

You know; I'm one of the most left-leaning people you'll find when it comes to taxes and socialism, but recently I've been thinking: "why should it be taxed twice?" If the money's being paid out in the millions to the big executives, shouldn't it just be taxed as income for them? Why should corporations be taxed at all? (Assuming you can stop the income tax from being evaded.) Shouldn't it only be taxed when it actually benefits a person (and not the legal entity of a corporation... those aren't persons no matter what the courts have said)?

You wrong, and I can prove it:

While the emphasis is correct to say "I couldn't care less", let's dissect that, shall we?

The least someone can care, logically, is zero, so in order to not be able to care less, you must care zero.

Yet you (and anyone else saying "I couldn't care less") posted, so you care more than zero.

Therefore, you could care less... you could care zero. If you post then the only true thing you can say is "I could care less... but not much less."

Q.E.D.

I like to combine all those into one word.

AFAIC, the third person gender neutral pronoun is "shit".