> laid with MINIX...

Works better if you say, "Linus knew MINIX."

...is the actual name of a leading researcher in this area. He gave a rather fascinating Google TechTalk a few weeks ago. Well worth the time.

Citation please?

Wish I had mod points today. +1 Insightful.

Solar output has been gradually increasing for a long time, and some "skeptics" claim this is the real reason for the climate changes we've observed (ie: not greenhouse gas emissions). But the emerging consensus is that this increase in solar output is nowhere near enough to account for the warming we've seen in the last century.

It might have something to do with Michigan's GOP governor appointing an emergency manager last March to take over the city (hoping to make an "example" of it). One could also argue that Detroit has been hardest hit among the cities you mentioned. It has lost nearly 70% of its population in the last couple of decades, and those few who remain have seen their property values plummet, taking the city's tax base down with them.

Thirty years of Reaganomics has crushed the American middle class and hollowed out our economy. It amazes me that there are still some people who think more of the same is what we need right now.

YDIW...

Damn you, girlintraining! I just checked out the new "beta" site and now I'm choking back the bile. Holy shit, does that ever suck! It's like a satanic spawn of HuffPo and FB... Painful.

I wonder how long the "legacy" version will remain available after the changeover? Heaven help us.

[mod parent up, please]

Although it will be a while before we get mass drivers working on the moon, even in the meantime, it's still much cheaper to boost out of Luna's gravity well than Earth's. Anyone who doesn't think there's a "business model" up there hasn't been paying attention to the last few years of development.

Not if the kingdom specifically supports a particular religion. (Actually, a particular sect of a particular religion.)

Ditto.

No need to.

Hmm... let's see... Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan (under the Taliban)...? Arguably Pakistan is teetering on the brink of theocracy. Several of the smaller Gulf states are dictatorial regimes with varying degrees of theocratic influence.

I agree with your overall point that Islam is not the giant bogeyman the many seem to think it is, but its track record with "democracy & freedom" is not without blemish.

Who needs planets? If the whole universe is a comfy "room temperature" you'd just need a bit of free-floating primordial soup to brew up some RNA, and with no gravity well to escape, it could spread rapidly throughout.

Let me google that for you...

Hm, no, that doesn't solve "the waste issue" it only makes one aspect of it easier to deal with. It's useless for spent nuclear fuel, for example.

The problem with SNF is that it's all mixed together. Most of the isotopes are actually quite useful for medical or industrial uses, but only if they are isolated from each other. As described in this video SNF from today's nuke fleet is like taking everything from your pantry and dumping it out on the floor in one big pile. There isn't much you can do other than shovel it into the dumpster. But if you have flour, sugar, salt, etc. all in separate containers you can use them to bake a cake.

This level of fine-grained reprocessing is difficult and expensive for solid nuclear fuels, but relatively easy and cheap to do with liquid nuclear fuels. This is one reason why molten salt reactors are getting more attention in recent years. It's just so much easier to chemically separate the various byproducts "on the fly" while the reactor is online.

You should learn how to code a URL in HTML before calling someone else a retard on Slashdot.

Sorry, I should have specified those with a "predisposition" to obesity, whether by genetics or prenatal environment or some other cause. They have various "breeds" of lab rats with such disorders, and they respond to low-calorie diets the way I described.

There was a study of Dutch people born during of WWII, and those who were in a certain stage of gestation (2nd trimester IIRC) during a particularly harsh period of widespread starvation grew up with a much greater propensity toward obesity. Such people would also respond like those rats to a low-calorie diet, preserving the "fat ratio" at the cost of growth or something else. (Sorry, no citation handy. I saw it referenced in another YouTube talk.)

The point is, the standard "received wisdom" about calories-in-calories-out is not necessarily applicable to everyone equally. As the GGP was saying, it's a lot more complicated and "individual" than that.