There is Tesla's Powerpack: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...

In the US, up to 328,000 birds are killed each year by wind turbins (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320713003522) That's not a lot; cats kill somewhere between 20 and 120 million birds a year. In addition the problem is being actively worked (http://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-birds) and hopefully that number can be lowered significantly.

Or you can just install Tesla's Powerpack (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/business/energy-environment/battery-storage-tesla-california.html?_r=0) store the electricity and sell it off later.

Not OP but I'll give you a better example. Let's say you are processing the temperature data of all of the US over 20 years, tens of thousands of weather stations with multiple readings per day. It's likely that some of those malfunction every now and then. How do you know which readings are correct and which are not? Well you can eliminate the outliers. You take an area and you look at the temperature readings - if they are all around 75F plus or minus 3 degrees, but you have one that's showing 90F, there is pretty good change that one station is busted. That's exactly how they deal with the urban island effect. Temperature readings in cities are higher due to high area of pavement/concrete, so instead they use the readings from a rural area nearby. In the end you don't care about the ups and downs, you smooth those over and you look at direction of the average. I

[quote]China has pledged to reduce its emission intensity (CO2 emissions per unit of economic activity) to 60-65% below 2005 levels by 2030, increase the share of non-fossil energy to 20% of total energy consumption in 2030, and to peak carbon dioxide emission before 2030.[/quote] http://www.climatechangenews.c...

He didn't misunderstand, he misrepresented the facts to fit his narrative. I don't know if he knew what he was saying was not true or if he was simply regurgitating what his staff fed him, but the end result is the same.

The rocket's efficiency can be measured in dollars and the fuel is cheap - only 1% or 2% of the cost of a launch is due to fuel. So having to carry all that reaction mass is not that big of a deal after all.

We've had ISS for decades, as well as HI-SEAS, a Mars hab test site. I think it's safe to conclude living without atmosphere is well understood. To get to colonization you need to start with a sight-seeing trip, after all that's how America got colonized.

We've had Mars Direct, a Mars mission concept that we know is viable, since 1990. There are legit reasons to go back to the Moon but testing is not one of them.

NASA's budget is $17 billion and they are spending 20% of that on the ISS. If you want to lobby Congress for more money for NASA great, but I don't see it happening. In the mean time NASA should consider what's the best use of it's money. Buzz wants to get people to Mars, which is great, but there are other opportunities as well. For example just 1 year of ISS spending can pay for the Europa clipper ($2 billion estimate) plus a lander (another $1 billion), a leading candidate for finding extraterrestrial life. Or pay for WFIRST ( $2.7 billion), a space telescope that will search for dark energy and will be able to image exoplanets. ISS is great and all but it's growing expensive to operate and we have to ask ourselves if it's worth it.

If Bigelow or another private company wants to put up a module and fly tourists to it fine, but I don't think private industry is ready to run the ISS. A better way to lower the cost is to get more counties involved, China being the most obvious choice. India might also be interested.

Yeah my sentiment exactly. My first language was TP and I can't think of cleaner, more consistent language.

Turbo Pascal here as well. I think they should still teach that as a first language, very consistent language and the english-like structure makes the code extremely readable and easy to follow for a beginner.

Trump made such a huuuuuge deal about Obama's golfing and now, when he has spent 20% of his time as president golfing, he is getting a pass?

you forgot: Resistance is futile!