Yes, seriously. It's lightweight, it's free, it's integrated into Windows Update so it's really easy to get updates, and best of all it doesn't continually hassle you and go LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! the way most of the other antivirus apps do. It just sits in your icon bar and does its job.

It's not brilliant, security-wise --- it's merely adequate --- but if you want something that hides itself away and gets on with things with a minimum of user panic, it's definitely the way to go.

I will see your pedantry, and raise you more pedantry: the stone is defined as 14 avoirdupois pounds; one avoirdupois pound is defined as 0.45359237 kg; therefore the stone is a unit of mass.

Yes, I was disappointed too. Still, we'll always have tons (which depending on the usage can be weight, mass, volume, energy, or power).

Her son Todd has taken over. Apparently they're not bad, although I stopped reading new Pern books years ago.

Bitcoin raining down from the Red Star, threatening to destroy all life on our planet, and only an elite squad of fire-breathing US drone fighter aircraft can save us? I agree that this does seem a little hard to believe.

Oh, _The Moon Moth_ is brilliant. There's a (slightly mangled; there's a repeated section in the middle, but all the text is present) dodgy copy online here:

http://www.unexploredworlds.com/RealPulp/htm/rpulp145.htm

Definitely worth a read. (Apparently it's been adapted to a graphic novel; it seems a shame to miss out on the Vancian prose, though.)

Personally I have a soft spot for the Demon Princes novels. Classic tales of revenge, with a twist; you don't realise quite how much characterisation Vance sneaks in until after you've read them. Must reread...

I have heard that this is actually <i>worse</i> --- because the smaller fragments are more efficient at transferring heat to the atmosphere, while a single big impact will absorb a lot of energy into the crust and reflect a bunch more into space. So an asteroid-sized dust cloud hitting the Earth at 11km/s stands a good chance of igniting every flammable object in a thousand kilometre radius. But I can't find a reference for that.

No, they wouldn't --- acceleration due to gravity is independent of the mass of the body. (The force due to gravity is GMm/r^2; acceleration is a=F/m; therefore the acceleration due to gravity is GMm/mr^2. The two m factors cancel out.)

What would happen is the nuke would push the fragments apart. These would continue to diverge, but would follow much the same course as the original asteroid. Whether they've been deflected enough to miss the Earth --- which is, of course, a really big target --- depends entirely on how hard the nuke pushed them and how long they travel before impact.

In order for the station to reenter, you'd have to change its orbital velocity by a substantial amount. The interwebs suggests that it's about 150m/s (that's about 300 mph for the metrically challenged).

To change the ISS's velocity that much in a single impact would destroy the entire station. I don't even think the ISS is capable of being deorbited without additional hardware; the Progress supply drones it currently uses to adjust its orbit carry very little thruster fuel. (Just enough to deorbit the Progress itself, plus some spare.)

Personally, the main bit which caused me to roll my eyes is right at the beginning, where the two astronauts admire the sunset, tumbling uncontrollably, while facing in entirely the wrong direction...

I had precisely this problem the other day, when talking to someone about DVCSes. It took about five minutes (of face-to-face conversation, mind; five minutes is a lot) to figure out that git and hg use the word 'revert' to refer to fundamentally different operations.

It would have been less confusing if he'd just said 'I don't know what that word means'. It was the fact that he thought he knew what I meant, but didn't, which was causing the problems...

Indeed. System crashes in rocketry tend to be... messier... than they are in IT.