> Plants grow in space!

No, they don't, unless by "space" you actually mean "a dense atmosphere comparable to Earth's".

Certain plants can *survive* in space, e.g., as spores, but they can't *grow* unless you put them in an atmosphere of some kind.

I said...
> But let's assume we could manage ten times Voyager 1's speed.
So far so correct.

Then I naively calculated based on the parent's figure of how far away Voyager 1 is, ignoring various facts, not least the actual speed of light and correspondingly large size of a light year. I was trying to save time by taking a shortcut. Yeah.

So when I said this...
> That would still make the travel time a couple of centuries

That was wrong. Really wrong.

Voyager 1 is going, umm, less than 40 thousand mph. Ten times that would be less than 400 thousand mph. Thus, even a HUNDRED times Voyager 1's speed would, in fact, make travel time (for a twelve-light-year trip) in excess of two hundred centuries.

Voyager 1 was not designed (primarily) to go as fast as possible. It was designed to study as many things as possible within the solar system on its way out.

If we put a good enough team of engineers on the problem, I imagine we could probably come up with a way to send a spacecraft to Tau Ceti in way less than half the time Voyager 1 would take to get there, maybe even as little as 10% of the time Voyager 1 would take, though that's starting to push the limits of our current technology. But let's assume we could manage ten times Voyager 1's speed. Multiple gravitational slingshots would need to be involved, probably culminating in a high-speed low-altitude pass around at least one of the gas giants, with a razor-thin margin for error, before finally heading out, but it might be feasible.

That would still make the travel time a couple of centuries, so we're not exactly ready for manned flights (just as well, given the acceleration forces such a trip would entail); but data the thing beamed back would start arriving here just twelve years after the probe got within range to start collecting it, if the signal it sent were strong enough to arrive here in tact. If we jumped on this project *right now*, we could potentially have video footage of the place by 2300 or so. (Of course, the footage thusly obtained would be horrifyingly low on detail by the standards of 2100, let alone 2300. But I bet it would be better than we can get from twelve light years away with a telescope, probably ever.)

They should've done a mash-up MegaMan game, where MegaMan goes up against various other popular video game characters and picks up some of their most famous capabilities. He could fight Mario and gain the ability to kill (some kinds of) enemies by jumping on top of them, defeat Sonic and gain the ability to do that spinning thing, face down Commander Keen and get the pogo stick, and so on and so forth.

If you want something that will help you learn other languages, don't make the mistake I made. Don't learn Perl.

If you learn Perl, you will rapidly lose all interest in other languages, because any time you try to pick one of them up, you'll be reading through the documentation and examples, and your brain will go, "All THAT just to accomplish THAT little thing? That's, like, eighty lines, and in Perl it would be, like, three lines. I'm gonna just go do it in Perl. Yep, see? Three lines, like I said. Four if you count the shebang."

Before Perl, I'd programmed in about twenty different languages. Since learning Perl, I've tried to learn half a dozen other languages, but I failed to really get into any of them.

If you want to learn other languages, don't learn Perl.

I think to achieve a 120-mile range, you're going to need towers at both ends. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that if one endpoint is on the ground, the other would have to be elevated about three miles, at which point fiscally speaking you may just about as well put it in low earth orbit.

However, I suspect the "120 mile" figure is probably what they figure the equipment would support GIVEN line of sight as a base assumption. In practice, dealing with topography and whatnot, you're probably going to need repeaters somewhat closer together than that. Still could be cheaper than laying fiber, and MUCH faster to deploy. The latter consideration is highly relevant for the military.

Actually, I'm guessing it could work for commercial usage if all the links were site-to-site links achieved with some kind of directional antennae (perhaps using conic-section backplates), so that they mostly don't pollute the airwaves all around them very much. In other words, an ISP (or any medium-to-large company) could set up a directional antenna in $smalltown and aim it at their other directional antenna in $wellconnectedlocation, creating a high-speed link between the two sites, without running fiber. Spectrum is mostly a non-issue since the two antennae are narrow-casting directly at one another: you can use basically any spectrum you want.

> Basically, this isn't intelligent design

Of course not. That would imply that the scientists who designed the genetic modification did so intelligently -- a preposterous notion. Since their custom GM fish all died as embryos, it's obvious that this was in fact a very unintelligent design.

> Also, you must be joking about running windowed for more performance.

Not joking as such, but I was perhaps a bit careless about terminology. I meant "window" in the sense of "small area in the middle of the screen that's actually drawn, surrounded by a big black border". Guys used to run "raycast" games (notably, Wolfenstein and Doom) that way. It allowed for the game to be rendered at resolutions lower than VGA supported for display, which improved performance, allowing higher frame-rates than would otherwise have been possible on the hardware of the day (think: 386 or 486).

Running real-time (as opposed to turn-based) 3D games in a Windows window came along rather later.

Now that you mention it I think the move to full-screen did, at least for most people, happen before the move to 24-bit color for 3D games. When I said everything had moved to 24-bit color by the mid nineties, I was forgetting that games in general and 3D games in particular lagged several years behind on that. (I played a lot of games during that era, but most of them were interactive fiction, which isn't really relevant to this discussion.) GUIs had almost totally standardized on TrueColor by 1998 or so (except, icons were frequently still made in lower color depths for a good while), and non-3D games (platformers and such) followed shortly after, but come to think of it 3D games did take a while to catch up. And then if a game crashed without changing the video mode back, you'd look at your GUI and want to puke. I'd almost forgotten about that lovely experience. Thank you for reminding me.

> 15fps was considered smooth not so long ago

When and by whom?

As far as I know, the 60fps figure dates from the mid-to-late nineties, when gamers first started talking about frame rate as the major perf metric (because color depth had stabilized at 24-bit and people had stopped being interested in running games in a window smaller than the full screen).

Heh. I thought Cracked was known for making stuff up in order to be funny, but except for a couple of snide side comments, that article is, as near as I can tell, basically all true. I guess when you're talking about North Korea, the jokes just write themselves.

You're making my point for me: it is _entirely_ believable that North Korea was attempting to place a satellite into orbit and simply didn't quite get it right. In fact, Occam suggests this is the most likely interpretation of the evidence.

> Assuming that you, unlike roughly 97% of your
> peers, have the *slightest* idea what you actually
> want to do for the next 40 years when you're 19 or 20.

I believe, if you re-read my post, you'll find that I actually said that students fresh out of high school are usually better off going directly to the four-year school in the first place. (Granted, I stated a different reason for this. Your reason is also valid.)

My claim was that an Associates Degree can be useful for a _returning adult_ student, i.e., someone who upon graduating from high school said "I'm DONE with school" and went out and got a job, but then a few years later they started to notice that all they jobs they can get without a college degree are jobs they don't really want. The exciting glamor of raking in the dough hand over fist at $6.50 an hour has begun to pale. These students are frequently not eligible for enough financial aid to make four years at a real liberal arts school (or even a state university) an attractive option, fiscally speaking, and they've had a few years of real-world workforce experience to help them think about what they really want to do with their lives.

Huh.

Okay, so I was wrong. (Well, behind the times at least.)

Upstate New Yorkers would agree with me.

I'm less sure about New York City dwellers, since NYC is one of two cities in the US specifically known to have both a subway system AND large numbers of taxi cabs. (The other such place is LA.) However, people who live in those two places are, compared to the rest of the country, not really all that numerous, in absolute terms. They have an exceptionally high population _density_, so their numbers are higher than one would naively think possible after looking at a map, but they're still very much in the minority.