Vapymid

A song of outstanding, somewhat haunting, beauty... VRONeSgFYZs Regards

That's a tough one to answer... If I knew exactly what to go for I'd be Elon Musk's partner I'm sure there are fortunes to be made there but on what? Hellas Planitia sparkling mineral water? Martian hematite jewelry? Organic vegetables from the Moon? Eros stainless steel? Regards

Here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16972761 I bet Malthus did not consider something like that as a factor... Regards

We have no incentives yet to send generation ships anywhere. This may change overnight once a habitable exo-planet is discovered relatively close by. Solar System exploration though is a different matter. Whoever get there first will have access to tremendous resources, potentially break-through micro-G manufacturing technologies and, not least, a great tourism potential. Establish a colony on Mars and/or Moon and/or Asteroid belt, then trade with them - that's how all empires grew in the past. The issues of energy costs and lack of suitable propulsion are valid but not insurmountable, especially if you consider nuclear propulsion (thermal or electric) which promises large enough specific impulse to make a trip to Mars feasible. More like Columbus-time caravel than a hand-powered plane... I don't believe it's possible. I think we can either expand or go extinct, "sustainability" is not favoured by nature, it seems. We need an initiator - a country or a private enterprise - to build a mine on an asteroid or a powerplant on the Moon and all of a sudden there will be a gold rush and the West will stand a good chance to lead and gain competitive advantage. Regards

I was not accusing, I was *responding* to an accusation or, rather, to an attack on character - as "some of you" casts shadow on everyone, except the accuser. Even then it was only half-serious as I qualified it by "suspicion" and "just". Regards

They were taunting her. Simply speaking, a foul-mouth youth from a screwed up family took on a bunch of similar opponents and, predictably, it all ended up in tears. Remember that she set the tone in her original messages with suggestions that people who don't like her go and suck various genital parts of human anatomy. No surprise that the responses came back along the same line. You see, one teenager inviting another to expose him/herself amidst a shouting match does not count as paedophilia with anyone other than overzealous politicians. Regards

You may note that I did not say whether or not something was an asteroid or cometary impact. All I said was that 5 km lower threshold is a big underestimation of the potential danger of an impactor. Whether Tunguska was solid or loose it does not change the energy. The consensus is that it *was* significantly smaller than your minimal size. In all likelihood there are plenty more where that came from, regardless whether it was a comet or a rock or a lump of metal. Regards

There are many hypotheses about Tunguska. Fusion is one of the least likely, fringe ones. Most likely is that it was a bunch of loosely bound rocks (perhaps glued together with ice - maybe a comet core, maybe an asteroid) and all of the mass burned up before reaching the surface, resulting in a thermal airburst. Had it been a denser rock it would have slammed into the ground and made a big nice hole, like the one in Arizona. Either way, the result would have been similar as the magnitude of energy released would have been roughly the same (given similar mass and velocity). Regards

Well, let's just hope that the source code for Episode 3/HL3 has not been accidentally placed closer to Gaben than his event horizon... Regards

Yes, a bunch of paedophiles, black feminist jewish homosexual paedo magomethans, they are! And commies to boot... I'm sorry but this whole episode is way too lame to be serious - you are trolling Michael, aren't you? What about it? More precise, what was ever paedophilic about it? Regards

I have a suspicion that you are just trolling in this and a couple of other recent threads, Michael. You *must* know that piracy is natural market response to unnatural anti-competitive restrictions imposed on it by a group of manipulators. You do like capitalism - you must be able to see that the way the Western IP laws are structured, they are rather more like an extreme form of feudalism. You should also be able to see that the recent onslaught of bills to "protect" the IP industry has nothing to do with eliminating "piracy" but is directed at consolidating control over the use of information (any information) in the hands of a small oligarchy. Regards

Hmmm, I actually agree with your every word in the above statement. Regards

I've heard this argument many times but I am not convinced it is valid. Mainly due to 2 points: - we are not good at making things perfect at home instead of going out, looking for something interesting. There must be an evolutionary reason behind it somewhere. If you spend all your time cleaning up your cave you are going to miss all the mammoths, which will then become food for a tribe in a nearby cave whose members are not so introverted... - There is less and less scope for the "developed" nations to find sources of economic growth here on Earth. The "developing" countries have learned how to make things, they will learn how to invent things that work well enough not to need the Western "intellectual property", they also sit on the most of the Earth's natural resources. What will the West trade for the labour and manufactured products then? I think you are a bit optimistic about the minimal size needed to do a lot of damage. AFAIK, the Tunguska meteorite is estimated to be much smaller than that - may be 100m or so, yet it could have ruined a major city if it'd hit a denser populated area instead of the middle of nowhere, as it did. Regards

6Jgnt7TyEak Regards

Procol is not all "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (which is not even their best song by far, anyway) ZlFPmHaXO9E Regards

The summary from a German review of the film after it premiered there last weekend (from Google translate, so the language is a bit funny): Full review is here Regards

MhI583sANAk Regards

It's supposed to be a Sci-Fi comedy mixed with political satire, like their first film... Regards

Well, I have high expectations of this one. I quite liked Star Wreck and that one was done on a budget much smaller than Iron Sky. Of course, a bigger budget does not automatically mean a better movie but these people are still relatively independent, the idea is good and no one can deny them the enthusiasm... Regards

Is this fracking awesome or not? Py_IndUbcxc Regards

http://www.reghardware.com/2012/02/09/valve_portal_gun_to_shoot_onto_shelves_soon/ I guess there will be great deal more of Portal-themed fan-made movies soon, also... Regards

[rant] I do not belong to "this" generation, really, but I can tell you the following: I've paid many thousands of dollars to the music industry, way more than average, I would think, mostly buying CDs from the moment I could afford to do it. I only did this because of all the music I already knew from swapping tapes with friends at school. Those same very tapes that were supposed to kill the music industry before there was teh internets. The "piracy" now is partly just that - a method of discovery which is essential for the music industry survival. If you stop that or if you somehow enforce payments for each download it will be like book shops charging customers for browsing the shelves - it will just kill the business. The other part of the "piracy" is a natural market response for imposition of artificial restrictions on competition, which the music industry so enjoys. Like everywhere, if you repress a market people will create a black market. The only efficient measure against black market is to have a free and fair "white" one but this is exactly what the industry does not want. It has undoubtedly become corrupt. Creativity, invention, competition is what the likes of RIAA fear and want to suppress - the "piracy" is just a convenient excuse for them to justify demanding ever more outrageous preferential terms from the legislature. Their business model is not about how they could provide better quality product, more conveniently and at better value to their customers but about how they could force the customers to pay for the same stuff over and over again. This is not limited to music but extends also to movies and now to games industries. In fact, I could go on about the IP in general and how it is totally unbalancing the economic foundations of the Western world but that will be too much even for a rant... [/rant] Regards

OvFb3UME6PM Regards

The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. JHnystTCvHs Musical grandeur on an epic scale... Regards

Yes, but that's the beauty of it - the military takes a novel idea, an unfinished technology, throws huge pile of money on it, makes it state-of-the-art, grows bored with it and gives it to civilians to play with... History is full of it - mass production, computers, antibiotics, jet engines, space launchers, nuclear power plants. All here largely due to them being developed by/for the military... And if they are going to spend a lot of taxpayer's money anyway I'd rather they spent it on something useful, like space exploration. Regards