The plastic bag used to be known as South Africa's 'National Flower'. Since the law was passed, circa 2008 IIRC, the level of plastic litter has plummeted. This works.

Oh yeah the law is that stores are obliged to charge for plastic bags. The price is something like R0.20 -- ~2 cents US / ~1.5 pence

Nope, it's 1 000 000 / 999 900 == 0.999 900, which, when expressed as a percentage is 99.99%.

Yup. In South Africa and Zimbabwe, obesity is a growing problem, and not related to income. It's probably related to the fact that people around here eat lots of maize meal.

- Nuke it -- not ideal, as we'll probably lose a few satellites, however the smaller pieces won't cause nearly so much damage. Most of the fragments will burn up in the atmosphere. Many will miss the earth entirely.

- Send a probe out to it when it's still far away. Position the probe close to the asteroid for a long time (months) -- the pull of gravity exerted by the probe will nudge the asteroid off its collision course.

- Wrap it in a giant piece of plastic, and mount some engines on it, so we can capture it into a nearby orbit. That much mass *in orbit* would be immensely valuable, even if it's just rock. (this one is probably unworkable due to the sheer quantity of fuel that would be required)

A manned mission is laughable, and only fit for the movies.

Monty Python: Search for the Holy Grail

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2R3FvS4xr4

What is the airspeed velocity of a swallow?

I like the current design, thank you very much, although Unicode support and support for editing posts would be appreciated. Oh, and it'd be nice if the front page didn't spontaneously reload while I'm reading a summary.

I think what we have seen in the nearly 1000 comments above is that people don't like or want the new site, and that it'd be a bad idea to change it. When slashdot moved over to the current 2.0 design, there was a lot of moaning but not nearly as much as the rabid hate the 3.0 design is generating; personally I liked the 2.0 design when it was introduced.

Actually I also thought that was the case; but it certainly wasn't Asimov, which is why I posted this. Further research (if you can call it research) reveals the wikipedia page which states:

'Although Watson is well known for his alleged 1943 statement, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers", there is scant evidence he made it.'

This technology is available today, but hasn't really caught on.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

Oops forgot the link: http://www.terrafugia.com/tfx-vision

Thanks but I'll wait for the TF-X when it comes out. No runway for me!

Damn straight. Their disastrous reactions were a lot worse than no reaction at all.

FTFY

Without math, it's impossible to convey what you're trying to convey. The press is way too dumbed down already, and many times I've read science stories that are just plain misleading as they try to simplify the message.

Putting equations into news stories means that some people won't understand them, but most importantly it will encourage some of those people to investigate further, and learn how to read equations. If there's no math in the popular press in the first place, then there's no incentive for people to improve themselves.

I've thought about mounting a gigantic railgun on the eastern flank of Mount Kilimanjaro. You'd need to lengthen the barrel partly into the earth to give a longer run-up. Keep the barrel evacuated -- you can probably use a plasma window at the exit point to keep the atmosphere out. (although I'm not certain a plasma windows would work terribly well with a large aperture -- can anyone tell me?)

The tricky part is you'd need to accelerate your projectile at over 5000 gravities for the ~ 0.3 seconds it would take to get up to escape velocity. (these calcs are about right to within an order of magnitude). That's quite a lot of acceleration.