Tidal friction seems like a major factor for heating Pluto. The system has its barycenter between Pluto's surface and Charon!

Careful with this headline. You never know who might be watching. Like, Peter Jackson.

"An awkward, feeble, leaky lie is a thing which you ought to make it your unceasing study to avoid; such a lie as that has no more real permanence than an average truth. Why, you might as well tell the truth at once and be done with it. A feeble, stupid, preposterous lie will not live two years -- except it be a slander upon somebody. It is indestructible, then of course, but that is no merit of yours."

- Mark Twain, "Advice to Youth"

A British voice was heard saying...

"And here's where he lives..." (some sort of bang)
"And here's his neighbor..." (bang again)
"And here's his neighbor's summer home..." (bang and some thumps)
"And here's the town by the beach - tropical island - the whole planet he lived on!"

The bangs became curiously long and bass-level, and the voice broke off into maniacal cackling.

...But what I really want is a Star Trek spin on the "space potato" video.

Tell me you don't.

Sometimes the appropriate technology is advanced, sometimes moving a pile of dirt into the right place does the job. Here's an example: http://www.earthbagbuilding.co...

Yes, you can retrofit many existing homes to this standard. You can even use sandbag-laying equipment for this purpose. What's in the way are regulations built to suit developers and homeowner's associations built around building and flipping energy-guzzling disposable McMansions - for starters.

The latest methods for building these homes resemble 3D printing and they only need a fraction of the solar panels a regular home does to be completely off-grid. Add rainwater harvesting and composting, and you just cut out the need for energy-guzzling waterworks. Add gardens and greenhouses, and replacing the first 50% of your food consumption from carbon-intensive sources is easy. Moreover, very little portland cement - itself alone responsible for 11% of humanity's CO2 emissions - is needed for this.

The gadget-oriented can still go to town automating the opening and closing of shutters and convective cooling to complete this completely self-sufficient home that could supply most of its occupant's food. Building one of these is a survivalist coup. Building a lot of these is a strategy to turn this crisis around without even touching a nuclear reactor.

I just want to highlight that we can easily bring our consumption down to a level that we can easily scale renewables up to 100% for.

Do you realize that carbon dioxide uptake from the atmosphere is what's driving ocean acidification? Compare the map of the world's forests to one hundred, one thousand, and ten thousand years ago. Add the fact that industrialization over the past two centuries got hundreds of millions of years' worth of sequestered carbon and released it into the atmosphere. What's this to the natural world? A top-level mass extinction.

The ecosystem's screwed. Whether it's beyond recovery is the question. Seeing as how humans come from an ecosystem, not a factory, we've got to be doing more about this than we are.

Really? You're sure that they just couldn't figure a fork out?

Here's the story of chopsticks. Having potential weapons at the dinner table became a real problem in times of tension, and it became a violent, rude spectacle to stab or slice your food at dinner with others - think state functions or otherwise. It implies what you might be thinking to do to others present. Hence, leave the knives in the kitchen with the cooks. Hence, you don't use those stabby forks. Spoons and chopsticks become the social acceptable ways to eat.

Not that everyone learns from the past however old their civilization is, but China's cultural roots are extremely sensible. Save your slurs for the stupid officials who are acting authoritarian in childish ways. They're not good examples of any culture.

Since we actually have a widely accepted portable assembly language now, I have been pondering this very question. LLVM assembly holds a lot of potential, similar to how the TAOS operating system promised back in the early 90's with its virtual processor assembly: https://sites.google.com/site/...

The guy who inspired me to want to program used to write assembly on a 386 with a slightly hacked copy of the 8086-oriented freeware assembler CHASM. He read compiled binaries in hex like code. I asked him, "Doesn't it take a lot more time to write in assembler?" "Not that much", he replied, "You break things down into functions and build libraries of code you don't have to reinvent, just like in C." The guy was freaking brilliant.

We've so frequently created new languages around new ideas in programming, and that's great, but eventually the number of abstractions becomes quite an issue. People are willing to write operating systems like MenuetOS in assembly in x86_64 asm. That's great. I'd love to see a compiler there to do validation of code, uphold Ada-like programming by contract, that sort of thing, but I'd love to see assembly programming make a comeback.

About those C++ templates, you said, "unless you stick to a very restrictive subset of C++ that's almost C, then you'll end up generating too much code (C++ templates are not just a good way of blowing away your i-cache on high-end systems, they're also a good way of blowing away your total code storage on embedded chips)."

I used to use the -fno-implicit-templates parameter on g++: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs... when I was doing C++ heavily. I also usually didn't have more than two templated types, mostly to keep the debugging simpler. Do you still have any quantification for the overhead with C++ code generation versus C's as you used it? Did you try options like this? And how heavily templated was the code?

How making spacetime move at FTL speeds could work. http://io9.com/5963263/how-nas...

General relativity only says *matter and energy* can move no faster than light. It does not say that about space-time, which is free to do so, and has.

Welcome to modern physics and the reason real scientists are hoping to build a real warp drive. I like it better than the Bible. ;)

Talk about a skewed, worthless study from Brookings. Garbage in, garbage out.

As Amory Lovins ably pointed out, its data is old. It also does not consider the entire cost of production, usage and cleanup. Cleanup costs count too! Are West Virginia, Ohio, British Columbia, Alberta, the Niger River basin, or Ecuador's rainforests, or the Gulf of Mexico just not in Charles Frank's back yard? I guess not. Screw people for living there, then. Do not the geopolitical considerations of an aggressive military foreign policy required to keep the oil flowing not count too? Screw those GIs and the people who live where they're sent in oil wars, too. Exxon's got to make a buck.

That's what externalization is. It means omitting key and pertinent parts of the picture and just sticking it to whomever is dealing with the consequences.

Solar panels are rapidly getting more efficient and cheaper to make, and you can put them directly on site where they're needed so you don't have to lose electricity to resistance across a far-flung grid with its necessary redundancies and overproduction, which are required in the event that a powerstation needs a maintenance cycle.

Someone's just keen to keep a bloody monopoly.

My most recent build was a Core i5 ITX with 16 GB of over-spec DDR and a GeForce GTX 550 Ti I had sitting around. I don't care about the latest games; I'd rather code and take breaks for Civilization or BSG: Diaspora or Nethack or some interesting moddable or open source game. Ubuntu and Arch Linux are my OS's, with Crossover for the occasional dip into gaming. Windows shall never touch its bare metal. KVM with pass-through to its Nvidia graphics is a godsend. I don't care what the headlines say, Linux desktops have been my favorite since the late 90's. Macs tend to win for laptops, but this could soon change. Nowadays, I'm more comfortable staying Unix-like only in my computing than ever.

If only Linux music players had the level of smart playlists that iTunes does, and support for more professional grade audio/MIDI interfaces (this means USB doesn't count). That would, for me, be perfect.

I want an FPGA in my next machine.

Joe. For Python, C++, bash, and in days of wretched drudgery for which Larry Wall will surely answer for one day, Perl.

Ever since the days of Slackware CDs and the Linux 0.98 kernel, I have happily used joe, a Wordstar-like editor with features and size comparable to vim. It's carried me through maintaining 80,000 line C++ codebases and I do my Python work in it quite happily. There are plenty of macro and regex capabilities, block text marking, everything I need without the weight of an IDE.

There hasn't been a single vi or emacs proponent that could do anything in their editor of choice that I couldn't do, and probably quicker. It goes like this: "But it's installed by default on Solaris!" I get my editor with a quick compile, and I know enough vi and nano to get there. It's super fast to install it on any modern Linux distro. "But it'll work when the terminal settings break!" Not a reason to select an editor for heavy coding. "But you have to make sure you have got properly formatted EOL characters and manage your spaces!" I do it just as well as they do; we're not talking about Windows Notepad here. "But more people use it!" Pike off, imaginary objectors.

If it works and meets spec, you use the tools you get the best results in.