Already you're up to 17*10^6/0.05/0.5*128*10 = 870 billion suns - that's about 8-9 Milky Way galaxies. And there's still a lot of extremely unlikely conditions in there, by the time you've reached "realistic" conditions you're probably talking about burning through most of the known universe.

So you're saying that a length of rubber hose would be cheaper?

you could have an infinitely fast computer, but even the Sun at E=mc^2 and 100% efficiency couldn't do it. It's not a speed limitation, it's an energy limitation. Take the Landauer limit at background radiation temperature. Plug that into a calculator and you get joules required: (2^256) * 1.3806504 * (10^(-23)) * 2.72500 * ln(2) = 3.0196359 * 10^54 Energy of sun: 1.98892 * (10^30) * (299 792 458^2) = 1.78755215 * 10^47

So you're saying I only need 17 million suns?

They're using an inefficient piston engine. If they use that fancy Australian Rotary Air Engine, they might have better luck. They might even attain a range of 30+ km, which would be enough to get me to work. :P

It doesn't really matter about the engine efficiencies. Even if you had 100% efficient engines and compressors and perfect isothermal heating/cooling, the theoretical energy density of compressed gas is very low. According to the analysis on wikipedia (which looks reasonable to me), the maximum theoretical isothermal volumetric energy density of a 200 bar tank is 106 kJ/L. The value for combustion of CNG stored at a similar pressure (250 bar) is 9 MJ/L. For comparison, gasoline is at 34.2 MJ/L and even Lithium Ion batteries are over 800 KJ/L and have room for improvement.

Air powered would be the easiest way to go, except that like all vehicles running on alternative energy, you can't get them anywhere.

Also, except that you can't get anywhere in them. From the link you posted "the only published test of a vehicle running on compressed air alone was limited to a range of 7.22 km". The biggest problem with gaseous combustion fuels is the limited storage capacity, and compressed air is much worse than any of them.

Let's assume that on one piece they currently have a dimension of 12 inches +/- 0.01 inches. So they convert this dimension to metric giving a new value of 30.48 cm +/- 0.025 cm. Excuse me?!?!? That's a rather odd and strange dimensional target to hand off to the machinest.

If your machinist/QA people can't understand 30.48 cm +/- 0.025 cm, you probably aren't a supplier to NASA.

This isn't a matter of trivia, where we are worried if plans are marked in inches or mm. Change to metric, now every bolt must be metric pitch thread, every nut must be changed to accomodate. Every calculation of mass and structural integrity has to be reexamined and recalculated for new components. You don't just magically say "ok, our 3/8" bolts are now to be called 9.525mm bolts" and call it a day.

Sure you can. Do you think NASA has drawings that just say "3/8 bolt" on them? No, they have a part number from a specification. What's stopping them from writing a specification for a "9.525mm bolt" that is equivalent to their previous part or editing the old spec to give metric equivalents? My understanding is that this is exactly what happened with the 12.7x99mm NATO aka .50 BMG ammunition.

I live in Rural Idaho, Cow tipping is a lot like snipe hunting. We would take gullible kids out to a farm in the middle of the night. They would try to sneak up on a cow and tip it. It would either move or not tip, and then move. We would convince them that their shoes were making too much noise. After they gave up their shoes, we would hop in the car and leave them in the middle of a pasture, barefoot, in the middle of the night, miles from home. That is what cow tipping is really about.

I grew up in rural Canada, and can assure you that you can, indeed, tip a cow. Certain breeds are more difficult to sneak up on and others wake up before they hit ground, but it is certainly not difficult once someone has shown you how. If you really are from a farm and have never done it or even seen it done, I suggest you visit us up north and we'll take you out one night and show you the finer points.

Generally speaking things are moving to metric (thankfully) but it will take many many years for imperial to die here currently we are in one big measurement mess and we will be for some time, especially as every traffic sign is in imperial.

I know of situations in Canada where they just painted a "k" on the pre-metric sign and moved it to the corresponding location.

The rights of shareholders of a corporation to be informed about materially relevant information about the enterprise do not in general override the privacy rights of its CEO

He should have the right to remain private about his health (i.e. not make a comment), even if it is materially relevant. However, if he decides to waive that right by making a statement, it does not mean he can lie about materially relevant information.

The possibility that the CEO of a corporation you're investing in is secretly very sick and will die soon is, well, just a risk that you have to take.

That's very different than a corporation making a untrue statements that their CEO is healthier than he is.

They tend to fall into two camps, those who attempt to use the lgpl parts of ffmpeg and publish the license; and those who outright ignore the gpl or pretend they've followed it. ffmpeg keeps a "Hall of shame" for these violaters but sothinkmedia have not yet been added.

I saw KMPlayer on the list of software not in compliance with the license and my jaw nearly hit the floor. KDE doesn't respcet the LGPL? What?!? However, it appears that KMPlayer on the hall of shame is the Kang Media Player at www.kmplayer.com, not the KDE mplayer frontend at www.kmplayer.kde.org. That was a close one.

Now, for a practical matter. If a friend from the US comes and visits, and makes copies (or downloads) of music, is she liable for copyright infringement when she returns to the US? Now, further, if she downloads exclusively from me, and yet is resident in the US, is she guilty?

I think another good question is whether it is legal to visit the States as a Canadian with music on your ipod which you legally copied in Canada.

Take, for example, HIV treatment. Most people probably couldn't afford the cocktail that keeps them alive. But I don't think its too terrible to throw in a couple bucks of year in taxes per person to help another guy stay alive, as long as he doesn't bitch about Republicans, in which case, I'd vote to cut him off.

Wow.

Code Reviews are useful when they are done right.

That's why Code Review Reviews are necessary. Of course, Code Review Reviews are only useful when they are done right.

There are tons of mathematical packages like Matlab, Octave and Mathematica if you just want to get your calculations done. So what's the advantage of Fortran?

Matlab can be considerably slower, unless you specifically write your code to take advantage of the fact that it calls fast precompiled and optimized routines, such as BLAS (FORTRAN), LAPACK (FORTRAN), EISPACK (FORTRAN), FFTW (OCaml), etc.

noone STOLE their identity.

In fact, they GAVE him a new one.