And that matters, why?

That's one way, but an even easier way is to adjust the two walls until the diagonal is 13m.

I'll give you a hint: I can do it more accurately with a long piece of string and two daubs of mud than a construction worker can do with his set-square.

You're building a house and you need to put up a 5m long wall and a 12m long wall such that they are perfectly square to each other. How are you going to do it?

Forget the prime directive. It's all about suppression by making sure the advanced stay ahead of the primitive.

Sure, it was capable of traveling long distances without losing power, and it would have too, if a rather large island hadn't been in the way.

There is also that silly notion that freedom is a core American value. There must still be a few patriots who remember this.

Not many. They all got sent overseas to get their asses shot off.

Actually, "A Nude Hope" (or "A New Grope") is better. There is such a thing as "going too fas...er, far".

Heh, news to me. And I like Pat Benatar. Cool. It's nice to know the connection, thank you.

Never ends your light
But forever is the night
Where flies your spirit.
And in the cold of Between
Shall our hearts forever keen.

I always loved the poems she put at the beginning of the chapters in many of her dragon books. I hope she likes it.

Yes, the Crystal Singer series was good. I also rather liked the Freedom series, as well as the Doona series. Then there's Restoree: a great little stand-alone(?) story.

Thanks to her, my reading ability at 11 was that of a 16 year old (with plenty of credit to my grade one teacher too, of course). Her Pern books still have a special place in my heart (hear hear! to the dragon tribute).

Well, may she forever fly with Moreta.

If the carbon cycle was worth the paper it takes to write two words, we wouldn't have coal deposits or limestone cliffs. It's too slow. Until we started digging the stuff out of the ground, every carbon based life-form on this planet was carbon negative, and even then, we're still carbon negative in the grand scheme of things. While we might be able to put a large chunk of the carbon back into the atmosphere, we'll never get it all (not that we'd want to, anyway: things might get a little stuffy).

Photosynthetic life has been committing slow suicide by depleting its primary "food" source, and then dumping its results "on the ground" to rot. Sure, that releases some carbon into the atmosphere, but methane isn't particularly useful to most life, and the rest winds up turning into coal.

Similar story for those life-forms that use carbon dioxide as building material (crustaceans). They dump their used product on the sea floor and it becomes limestone.

Here's something to consider. Some billion years ago (I don't know the exact numbers, might be just hundreds of millions), the entire world was desert (mostly barren rock, maybe some sand), but plants spread out and converted the world to lichen covered rocks, grassy plains and forests. Now, we have spreading deserts. Why? Sure, we may have started some (maybe even all) of them by cutting down too many trees (and other agricultural practices), but considering what plants did in the past, that should not be the case. For some reason, the plants are unable to overtake the deserts. There are two major differences that hamper plant growth: there's a lot more sand now (shifting sand can bury plants), and there's a lot less carbon dioxide in the air. The plants can't get enough food to grow quickly enough to encroach on the deserts.

We are part of the carbon cycle. Originally, we were on the same "side" as everything else, sucking carbon out of the atmosphere (net, otherwise we wouldn't grow), but now we are on the other "side", pushing it back in.

If carbon dioxide causes (or contributes) to global warming (and that's still an "if") and causes sea levels to rise, so be it (and my butt is maybe 4m above sea level). Sure, rising sea levels will mean less arable land, but higher carbon dioxide levels will mean better growing conditions, so the net might be more arable land.

If the carbon was worth anything, we wouldn't have this discussion because humans wouldn't be able to find enough carbon to put into the atmosphere for anyone to notice. Probably wouldn't have the Internet, either.

Simple: create a new religion and call the old one paganism and/or devil worship. What can go wrong? ;)