why, it's simply the length of your foot. So, use of this unit of measure should be easy for most anyone... Just pace the distance off.

Unfortunately, for you, it will mean exactly what the parent poster said... SWAT will come and drag you away, alive or dead depending on how you behave. Since you have "endangered your children", they will be taken away and given to foster care. Under foster care they will be given medical examinations, which will include any vaccinations they've missed. You'll lose, possibly both your life AND your children.

For some time now, Mark Russinovich at Microsoft has been talking about just how bad the Windows kernel was/is in his blog.

If you're serious... use offsite storage. If you think your house might burn to the ground, and you think your fire safe won't protect optical media, then backup to an offsite location. If you think your house might catch fire and the fire department will come and put out the fire before reaching the limits guaranteed by your safe, then backup to an offsite location because the fire department is going to flood your home with water in the process. If you think your safe is waterproof; and, you live within the 500 year flood zone, backup to offsite storage because a "waterproof safe" won't survive long term immersion... If you're not within the 500 year flood zone, backup to offsite storage anyway because a severe storm may rip the roof off your house and flood it anyway.

There's a theme there. You can't plan for every possibility. Either put the data onto a portable drive and store it in a local bank's safety deposit box; or, encrypt your data and backup to the cloud. Just make sure there's a copy offsite somewhere

There was a time... back in the 80's and 90's when I used tape backup. QIC comes to mind. Iomega had some other solution as well. If you cared about your data you backed it up to something. Period.

I'm not familiar with CERN; but, in U.S. installations these systems were typically built with robotic tape silos and a big disk cache. Something like 6 to 10 tape drives and thousands of tapes per silo.

Orbit is too circular for that solution to work.

DC itself is on a sedimentary deposit and sits in a former tidal swamp. The geology of the area is such that they might not notice small quakes all that much. Just west of DC (beginning around Alexandria) is the Piedmont, the edge of the mountains; so, it is possible to transmit energy to the area if the quake is sufficiently large. There's a region around Louisa County and Charlottesville, about 100 miles south west of DC, that regularly spawns small earthquakes . They occur a couple of times a year and are typically in the 2 to 3 range like the Oklahoma quakes. This is the region that spawned the 5.8 quake that damaged the Washington Monument.

Nope. It goes somewhere but there are use cases where it's put into the ocean. Yes, energy goes somewhere in the system, it doesn't disappear. The question was about the affect on the atmosphere.

This. Grandparent shouldn't have been modded up.

Earth's sustainable population using current tech is somewhere between 9 and 12 billion. People are only going hungry for political reasons. There's plenty of food, it just doesn't get to those who need it. As to energy, there's not enough resources readily available for everyone to live at U.S. levels, which are frankly a bit wasteful; but, it is possible to pull everyone up to a similar standard of living, in time.

Affects of wind turbines on the atmosphere have been studied. Of course they have a localized effect. Short version is the turbines cause local mixing of higher altitude and ground level air, resulting in minor changes to local weather down-wind. The mixing and turbulence will affect pollen and dust in different ways, depending on particle size and where they were (high/low) to begin with. Overall you're pulling heat out of the atmosphere; so, not a bad thing. Turbine numbers would have to get truly massive in order for them to have any significant global effect.

Wind is the playground bully. Bigger than everyone, towering above all the other kids. It' a big blowhard, mouthing off at the slightest provocation. Flailing it's arms around and thumping anyone who gets in it's way. No one likes a bully.

Clearly you don't work in the embedded world, where VLIW processors, using word lengths that are not a multiple of a byte, are common.

In science, if you're having to make exceptions to fit the rule to nature, then the rule doesn't make sense.

That's the general idea. You have to add all the objects that meet the criteria. The current criteria does not depend on characteristics of the object itself; the definition includes characteristics of the surrounding objects as well. I tend to agree with the argument that the current definition is wrong, for this reason.

The Kuiper belt and scattered disk are where all the remaining stuff left over from the formation of the solar system ended up. It was pushed out there by the larger planets. Unless the body is very large, for example like Uranus, it's not going to be able to "clear it's orbit" in that region of the solar system. If another large planet did exist out there, it would probably scatter everything in it's orbit, effectively pushing the Kuiper belt and scattered disk further out. Any smaller body, perhaps even an Earth sized body, would be unable to clear it's orbit. So, if the Earth's double was found out there, you would have to call it a "dwarf planet" by the current definition. That doesn't make sense.

it would be much more than 10 or 11. There are 4 other objects that have been recognized by the IAU, Haumaea, Makemake, Eris, and Sedna. There are a number of others which have been observed but have not been recognized yet by IAU. The number could easily be > 20.