You said that we can't predict volcanos and quakes. That isn't entirely correct. Mt. St. Helens was predicted, and they cleared the mountain of most people.

And we do have signs of impending quakes, including certain mediterranian ants. Also, IIRC, methane gas release is also considered to be a quake precursor.

Which DOES make me wonder, if this methane release is normal, or recent. I guess we won't know, or even have an idea unless we compare it to other areas.

Blimey, in about 1998 this old guy from the Jo-Hos knocked on my door and presented me with some literature including something about how "all scientists" believe in god, especially the Great Fred Hoyle, so God must be there.

It also said that "scientists are telling us" about this vast, untapped wealth of hydrocarbon deposits on the deep sea beds in the form of these methane thingy-ma-bobs, so God had provided us with all the energy we'll ever need. He's a great guy that God dude! He didn't mention atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and global warning, though.

So, the Jo-Hos are right. God is really there! And we will never run out of energy!

Slackware does things The Right Way(TM). I've been using it since 1995 as my main distro with a brief detour into SLAMD64 in 2007 when I bought a 64-bit AMD and Slackware was still x86-32.

I've had the misfortune to have to suffer Debian. RedHat/CentOS, Ubuntu and Arago for work over the years, but Slackware is the best. Everything I've learned from Slackware has empowered me to be productive with all of those other distributions.

why?

Learning a language that comes from a completely different school of thought (i.e. "paradigm") will give you a far larger perspective than only having learned one language or family of languages. For example, if all you ever saw was C++, Java and C# your world view would be extremely limited. Someone who has learned a little FORTH, LISP and Smalltalk, not to mention various assembly languages, would be an order of magnitude more productive than you, produce fewer bugs and be able to think of more good solutions to difficult problems.

If all you ever do is write GUIs for the corporate Oracle or MS database, then stay in your C# paradise.

Making the earth's crust rise should not directly affect the strike-slip San Andreas fault at all. However, it has been anecdotally noted on syzygyjob.com forums that thrust quakes seem to be on the rise, along with hypothesizing that the rising crust might release friction allowing exactly that.

For my own part, I've noticed a large increase of small quakes surrounding the great elliptical basin, the southwest of which coincides with the rising sierra nevada; and occasional time-coincident radial forays into the same basin.

So I half wonder if the rising isn't part of a larger-scale process.

Why not... get with small museums and astronomy clubs in remote (low-light-pollution) locations across the US, and use smaller scopes not just at your location, but set up all across the US?

Then phase the scopes together, and use scheduling software to let the museums (and you) use them.

Early on, you should be able to get an image under any weather conditions.

Later, as you upgrade and develop your software, you should be able to get excellent 3-D images of planets, better identify the orbits of asteroids and comets, identify new asteroids (take one image, align it to others, and subtract the scaled values to minimize the overall light. Then look for arrays of speckled dots, that indicate a closer object. )

Eventually, what you could end up with is a very large phased array.

Errr... the UK still has an reasonable approximation of a well-functioning court system. That the police say something is illegal isn't enough to get you thrown in jail.

It is under Tony Blair's Anti-Terror Laws. You only need to be suspected of something that could be vaguely related to terrorism to be locked up. No jury trial involved, just the police, some politicians and a few judges.

Very wise words.

I'd add to that: write unit tests for your code (preferably before you write the code). You'll understand how it works and where it's broken quicker and better and free up your brain cycles more for the creative design part.

You will learn and improve much more quickly with much less stress.

Back in the day (80's 8-bit micros) I started on BASIC and Z80 machine code followed by a little FORTH.

The one thing I really wish I'd known about - or understood - was what LISP really is. It was often described in the popular computing press as a language "for processing lists."

How very wrong. The reality is so much better.

I didn't seriously look at the lisp family of languages until about 6 or 7 years ago. I really wish I'd looked 25 years sooner.

Okay, here's your first citation.

http://www.elizabethriver.org/

Now, having worked on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, I can assure you that it is common in the newspapers to have articles about projects to restart clam and oyster aquaculture, which crashed, resulting in a spike in pollution in the water.

But more to the point, I worked at Atlantic Metrocast, where the land had been taken over by the military during world war 2, and all kinds of extremely toxic munitions leaked in. That site is a superfund site, paid for by the Federal Government, because they are the ones who polluted it.
To the south is Julian Creek, where munitions were just dumped into the water, and the cancer rates and birth defect rates are sky-high.

Oh, I haven't mentioned the shipyards yet. They also were dumping in the river, aah, welding materials, lead, whatnot. AND, when the company at the old Bells Mill site needed to turn the mashland of their worksite into solid land, they used fill from the shipyards. So as you walk along the land at BayShore Concrete, you'll every so often find all kinds of heavy-metal-laden industrial parts there, embedded in the ground.

Oh, and don't forget right by the Gilmerton Bridge where there's a recycling center that tears down ships.

Now, that's just the Elizabeth. Let's move on up to the James, where you have Tenneco/Newport News Shipbuilding, the Navy's ship graveyard, and of course Smithfield Hams. And all that agricultural land that gets sprayed every year.

Or how about the Shenandoah River, which five years ago practically died due to heavy metal pollution in the Shenandoah Valley, and dumps into the Chesapeake Bay through Maryland?

Citation needed, I gave you one; I mentioned a few other places where you can find more.

One hint is that wherever you find the military, destruction is not far behind.

Open your eyes and look for yourself, and quit with the laziness, because that's what it is.

No, we just need to rethink our concept of what a 'live' human means. In the future, it can mean a human who makes a geiger counter jump off the table.

Really, though, the constraint ennvelopes for cars and planes is completely opposite, one from the other. What that means is that a flying car will perform neither job well, which means that even when (not if) invented, it won't sell. And it'll burn up those fossil fuels.

Cars have to be narrow. Planes have to be wide, for stability and lift. Cars have to be strong against head-on, rear-end, and (somewhat) t-bone crashes. Forplanes, that's utterly unimportant, but they need to be strong against vertical shocks, which doesn't matter for cars. Cars should be heavy planes should be light. Cars need to do well under low-maintenance conditions; planes that are under low-maintenance should be retired.

I can edit tens of thousands of lines of code in an instant with sed and grep without even "opening an editor." Through the miracle that is sh I can pipe stuff into my custom (very small and simple) C and sh tools to frob the code. Then I just type make to rebuilt it all and my unit tests tell me that it worked.

At the other side of the office, they're cursing and swearing and Microsoft(TM)(R) Visual(C) Studio Intergalactic Azure Edition For the Enterprise(R) because it's still importing the project...