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Comment Re:Demand (Score 5, Insightful) 224

They're all fatally flawed. The biggest problem with biofuels as they currently are is that we're not really doing them right. We're taking food and converting it to fuel- when we should be producing the fuel as a recycling process which isn't the same thing and isn't as "polluting" and the like. It's not a solution, per se, to fuel- but it is a solution to convert what'd go into landfills and the like into something else useful as it can be used for fuel and feedstock for plastics, medicine, etc.

Comment Re:How is maintenance performed? (Score 1) 148

I can see a good BOHF episode answering this question.

The episodes have addressed it many times. In fact, both the article AND THE /. story talk about it: "We developed a solution that reduces the oxygen content in the air, so that even matches go out..."

The answer is easy enough: Halon satisfies their requirements, as do Halon substitutes. They work well for cooling and suppress fires. Halon discharges are a BOFH staple.

Comment Re:"A hangar in Mojave" (Score 3, Informative) 38

That's actually what it's like at "Mojave Spaceport". Hangers of small aviation practicioners and their junk. Gary Hudson, Burt Rutan, etc. Old aircraft and parts strewn about. Left-over facilities from Rotary Rocket used by flight schools. A medium-sized facility for Orbital. Some big facilities for BAE, etc. An aircraft graveyard next door.

Earth

Fish Found Living Half a Mile Under Antarctic Ice 79

BarbaraHudson (3785311) writes "Researchers were startled to find fish, crustaceans and jellyfish investigating a submersible camera after drilling through nearly 2,500 feet (740 meters) of Antarctic ice. The swimmers are in one of the world's most extreme ecosystems, hidden beneath the Ross Ice Shelf, roughly 530 miles (850 kilometers) from the open ocean. "This is the closest we can get to something like Europa," said Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a chief scientist on the drilling project. More pictures here."

Comment Re:Really? (Score 3, Interesting) 99

Considering that RMS didn't dream these licenses up, but rather Eben Moglen, you might want to contemplate who knows more about this... The law professor that actually teaches on this subject or someone claiming that there is a right of revocation in there that's effectively free of Promissory Estoppel and the like on the subject. Just because there's a law on one side doesn't mean other laws don't cause OTHER, equally bad problems on the subject and effectively preclude the hypothesized notion out of box.

Comment Re:Perhaps ... (Score 1) 99

No, if you're doing your legal documents right, it does place it into the Public Domain as intended. How? Promissory Estoppel prevents such an act from even being ran up the flagpole on an infringement suit. If you actually DID this, just because you can revoke assignments, etc. doesn't give you carte-blanche to actually DO it the way they're describing there.

Without covenants in place as part of the agreement, yeah. There's a problem. With them, this is really nothing more than the nattering of someone trying to make a vastly bigger deal of things than is really there.

Comment Heh... (Score 5, Interesting) 99

Bingo!

You can't make promises or covenants of this nature with the intent of even remotely considering to revoke them. Your successors are also bound to them. Typically someone will bring up Promissory Estoppel and then raise Bad Faith- and then move to dismiss the case you brought against them...and most typically get it.

Comment Re:They already have (Score 1) 667

There is no reason that we have to pick one and abandon work on the others. I don't see that the same resources go into solving more than one, except that the meteor and volcano problem have one solution in common - be on another planet when it happens.

The clathrate problem and nuclear war have the potential to end the human race while it is still on one planet, so we need to solve both of them ASAP.

Comment Re:They already have (Score 1) 667

Sure, there are going to be mediating forces in the environment. Melting is an obvious one. The positive feedbacks have been getting the most attention because they are really scary. It appears that there are gas clathrates in the ground and under water that can come out at a certain temperature. The worst case is that we get an event similar to Lake Nyos, but with a somewhat different mechanism and potentially many more dead. The best case is a significant atmospheric input of CO2 and methane that we can't control.

I don't think I have to discount Trenberth. He's trying to correct his model, he isn't saying there is no warming.

Comment Re:They already have (Score 1) 667

Thanks.

McKitrick is an economist out of his field. Trenberth and Fasullo cite many of their other papers and the publications to which they were submitted, but it seems mostly not accepted. But their conclusion seems to be that there were other times in recent years that the rate of warming decreased for a time only for it to return to its previous rate. I only see the abstract for Kosaka and Xie, but they state "the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase."

Comment Re:They already have (Score 1) 667

I imagine that the major financial companies make this part of their economic modeling. Most of them do publish weather-related and climate-related advisories regarding commodity and company price trends, etc. How detailed do they get? The wouldn't tell and I am the wrong kind of scientist to ask. Can we make a government or public one? Yes, the level of detail is the big question.

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And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones

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