http://www.spacex.com/webcast/

@13:38 he explains that all the critical functions needed to operate the spacecraft are available as manual (physical) buttons in the middle of the (locking-into-place) instrument panel. That includes a joystick for maneuvering.

Are you me from 2004?

Ten years ago I taught my sysadmin students how to write kernel modules in Linux (on their LFS systems I had them build); these days I make a living coding in C#...

Also, in 2004 I was 35...

He's in another chain of command, he reports to General Mayhem.

It was served at 88 degC (190 degF), I sincerely doubt that you drink tea that hot. Perhaps you want it served that way, but you do NOT pour 88 degC liquids down your throat.

From the wikipedia page about the case:

Liebeck was taken to the hospital, where it was determined that she had suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent.

Reading further, she originally sued for $20,000 (hospital costs + lost wages), to which McD offered her $800.

Yep, that's how I treat many of my country's traffic laws, e.g. yielding for pedestrians on crosswalks: Fat lot of god it'll do me knowing I had the right of way when I've just run over and killed or badly injured someone. Let them cross, yapping obliviously away on their cellphones.

Or, conversely, if I'm the pedestrian - fat lot of good it'll do me knowing I had the right of way when I'm in a hospital bed with two broken legs. Let them pass, yapping obliviously away on their cellphone.

Cellphones and traffic don't mix, whether you're in a vehicle or biking, walking, or running. 99% of the bad driving I see is someone holding his or her hand to their ear...

Whoosh.

That was the sound of the Millenium Falcon - the only ship to ever do the Kessel Run in under 12 Parsecs - passing over your head.

You can start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield.

"A continuously variable transmission (CVT) is a transmission that can change seamlessly through an infinite number of effective gear ratios between maximum and minimum values. This contrasts with other mechanical transmissions that offer a fixed number of gear ratios. The flexibility of a CVT allows the input shaft to maintain a constant angular velocity."
  - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuously_variable_transmission

My 2012 Toyota iQ 1.33 has one, and it's the smoothest ride you could ask for. A passenger once commented "You never hear it changing gears", to which I answered "that's because it never does" :)

Thank you, that was a very informative link.

I guess the answer really is twofold; for one, everything is moving apart from everything else, so two objects moving apart on directly opposed vectors could do so at very, very close to the speed of light and the combined speed of separation for an external observer would be almost twice the speed of light, and secondly that the speed of light "limit" is for things travelling through the universe, not the fabric of the universe itself.

Thank you again :)

"Rapid" doesn't really do it justice; if I've understood the theories (or rather, the analogies of the theories) correctly the expansion was equivalent to an object the size of a proton swelling to 10^19 light years across, in just 10^-33 seconds.

Also, and yet again I may be misunderstanding the analogies of the theories (I'm very far from being a cosmologist), the size of the observable universe was roughly 3 metres at that point; the whole universe was about 10^23 metres across - so it grew a fair bit in the intervening 13.8 billion years as well, but not nearly as rapidly as during inflation.

Which leads me to a question that always nagged me; wasn't the speed of expansion during inflation faster than the speed of light? Any cosmologist or mathematicians out there want to offer some insight?

Yep, just a plain old orange BIOHAZARD sticker works wonders.

At the end of the Permian era, 250m years ago, the global temperature rose by six degrees. That wiped out 95% of all life on earth.

That's why people come to that conclusion; it has happened before.

That, and the fact that just a few degrees may well kill off just about all marine life, raise sea levels, create deserts where there's currently farmland, melt the permafrost (releasing massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere, further accelerating global warming), melt the polar ice caps and the glaciers, deforest the rain forests, and basically make the world a hell-hole.

Sure, humanity could possibly survive; but at what cost and what kind of life would it be? We can't build AC and heating for the whole ecosystem...

Here's an interesting doomsday summary, degree by degree, from one to six degrees: http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm

You don't live in Europe, do you?

In Northern Europe it has been one of the mildest winters in 50 years.

Just the other week I actually completed the main quest line in Skyrim for the first time - and then I looked at my Steam stats. 330 hours played...

And that's without any of the DLCs :)

Quite looking forward to Elder Scrolls Online now - the PvP looks excellent from what I've seen :)

It's a 99.something% consensus, which is as solid as any consensus among a large population is ever going to get. Out of 13,950 peer-reviewed climate articles from 1991-2012, only 24 reject global warming. (source)

All the evidence we have for previous natural variations show them to be slow (or extremely rapid, as in catastrophically rapid - impact events or super-volcano eruptions); the changes we're seeing today is way too rapid to conform to any known natural cycle. The difference, of course, is that we're around and actively adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. In short, not a "natural variation".

We don't know; that's the problem. We don't have any crystal balls, so we don't know what the most effective strategy is, or exactly how severe the effects will be. What we do know is that large climate changes historically have been responsible for some of the most drastic extinction events we know of. And it's pretty easy to speculate about what a massive dying-off of e.g. marine life would do to coastal communities - as is the effect on the same communities of rising sea levels.

No, these are not minor issues, and the ramifications of the decisions are huge. In the end though, doing nothing is probably the worst decision; there is a tipping point somewhere (the edge of the cliff, so to speak) which going past that there is no turning back. More research and discussion is always welcome, but that should not and cannot stop us from starting to act - if nothing else to slow down the rate at which we're approaching that tipping point.

The analogy with the earth-centric cosmic models and burning of a few heretics is really stretching it when we're talking about the possibility of mass extinctions of not only humans but a lot of other species as well.

The earth will survive, and life itself will survive. The question is, will we? And even if we do, in what kind of society? One that has planned for such an eventuality, or one that has had to just react to it. One is liveable, the other is a post-apocalypse society; I know which one I'd rather (have my kids) live in.