Am I the only one old enough to think that RCS is the great-great grand-uncle to git, and that the message protocol theyâ(TM)re talking about now needs a different TLA? Can one of you youngsters help chase these kids off my lawn?

• * Literally this poll is the reason I am installing Chrome

Not that Google is much less pushy about switching to Chrome, but if you're going to force me to answer a question before I do what I want then you should at least let me answer that your question is the reason for my decision. The same as every app I've left a negative review for.

Me: [doing what the app is intended for and generally enjoying life]

App: [interrupts with a dialog box forcing me to choose an option] Are you enjoying App?

Me: No, I am not enjoying that you interrupted what I was doing with App to force me to leave a review for it. What I was doing with App happened to be time-sensitive and important. Your idiotic interruption just cost someone's life and/or inconvenienced me in some small but perceptible way.

Why is it necessary to have something floating around inside an unmanned capsule?

Wasting insane amounts of energy is not a bug in decentralized cryptocurrency. It is a feature. In fact, it might be the only feature.

91% of the time, it works every time.

What we actually need is an emergency broadcast system that respects urgency, priority, and relevance to its audience. We have the technical capability to target an ad to me here on Facebook that knows I was shopping for a Microsoft Surface earlier this week, but somehow this is how our emergency alert system actually works:

Some grumpy old guy 200 miles away storms out of a family meal to walk to the bar. They call the police. Then they find the guy at the same bar he always goes to when he is mad at them. Then the police issue a Silver Alert to cover the entire state, just in case an elderly jerk is healthy enough to walk 200 miles across open prairie but somehow will be in a health crisis when he gets to my town. My phone and all those around me make annoying sounds. Everyone thinks there's an active shooter at the local post office and, since we all hate our local post office for losing mail and lying about it, everyone gets their own guns and heads to the post office. Two days later, the evening news (that nobody watches) reports that the Silver Alert had been issued after the guy was found at the bar, just trying to have a beer in peace away from his annoying family.

For years now, the editors have not understood science. Now, they don't even understand scientific notation.

The difference is that Americans have the right to vote without being encumbered by the truth about any candidate.

I don't know about the rest of them, but while I waited for Emacs to compile and load, I wrote a major made for posting Slashdot comments. Of course, I used Vim to write it because it has better syntax highlighting for Lisp code than Emacs does.

The wells in that region produce mostly crude oil and natural gas. Crude oil is easy to store in tanks, put into tanker trucks, and otherwise get off the well site to the market in a variety of ways that you can use from day 1 of drilling the well. Natural gas must either go into a pipeline, be vented into the atmosphere, or be flared (burned) into the atmosphere. Pipelines can take years to catch up to drilling (not really due to regulation as others have pointed out, but rather due to rapid drilling for profitable oil outpacing thousands of miles of pipeline construction to sell much less profitable natural gas, along with lack of enforcement of regulations intended to restrict flaring to a certain time period after drilling a new well). So a lot of gas has to be vented or flared. Venting is considered worse than flaring for the atmosphere (because methane is a worse global warming gas than CO2 as you pointed out), so it all gets flared. Perhaps flaring burns the methane but not the ethane, or at least not all of it, which is why ethane is the problem we are focusing on here?

The challenge is stranding someone alone on Mars. It's easy to envision the entire crew getting stuck there. Malfunction in the ascent vehicle would do that. If it had a sufficient electrical meltdown it could even justify the loss of contact with Earth. But getting five people safely off the surface, all of them convinced of the sixth crew member's death and unable to retrieve his body, was a writing challenge. What scenarios can you think of for one man being left alive, alone, and presumed dead on the surface of Mars?

SPOILER ALERT: Spoilers about the first chapter of the book follow! (Because someone is likely to complain about that kind of thing.)

Has anyone actually done the math on this? We are not talking about a man being blown around in a windstorm, really. We are talking about equipment that NASA launched to Mars getting blown around in a windstorm. The ascent vehicle getting blown nearly over is a stretch, for sure, but perhaps the injury that befalls the protagonist is not. It was inflicted on him by a piece of metal that was thrown by the windstorm. I am not qualified to do the math, but I hope someone else here is.

While the protagonist and most likely the ascent vehicle are fairly heavy, presumably everything else that NASA spent rocket fuel to put on the surface of Mars is as light as it can possibly be to still do its job. It would not take much air density to pick up a piece of metal that has high surface area and small mass, like a thin piece of aluminum with a bend in it to make it rigid would be. It certainly could be whipped by the 150kph (42m/s) wind. Anything near that speed and it would not have a problem piercing a spacesuit or damaging a circuit board. Maybe it would not likely have enough energy to do both of those things and still seriously injure a human, but it is at least plausible from this high-level perspective.

So, who here has the knowledge and the energy to run the numbers on whether this is more than just plausible and actually possible? I wish I had the former because I certainly have the latter and enjoyed the book--the plot, the technical details, and the writing style--enough to want other people also to enjoy it. Maybe Randall Munroe will give it a shot, although it is a bit non-absurd for his usual taste.

By the way, let's give the author one deus ex machina point for how he solved the final problem that his characters faced. Does he get a negative deus ex machina point for how he created the first problem that they faced and thus balance it out or do both problems and solutions have positive valence when counting the dei ex machinis?

I thought their current business model was to charge everyone $5 per month, including non-subscribers. At least that's what my credit card statement and numerous online forum posts seem to indicate. Their customer service apparently also sucks, as they refuse to answer when you e-mail or call to discuss the fraudulent charges. They could probably become more profitable if they started earning money instead of stealing it.

I fork every project I use in order to produce a version with all the comments and error messages modified to include the Oxford comma because nobody with commit privileges on the original project will merge my grammar correction patches.