Nuke

you can also 11 ^ 0b10 = 9. bitwise ops for the win (in this case ^ is xor, not exponent).

its probibly a dune reference. the north polar region was the "habitable" zone because it didnt have any worms and it was sheltered from storms. the book didnt mention anything about pyramids there, but i think there was one in the 80s movie and another in the children of dune miniseries.

i havent downloaded the new build yet, because im one package away from a new pc build. but i think im going back to 32 bit for awhile when i do. 64 bit was a huge impediment to my game last time and i couldn't get my usual suite of mods to work when i was done with stock. i dont think modders should actively break compatibility by compiling 32 only dlls (the default is usually both), but i can accept the no support policy. 64 bit is really only out for squad to get community feedback on bugs and such. if you are an active participant in bug reporting, you might want to run 64 bit to help improve that build. otherwise it will just get in your way and irritate you.

once you learn one language, learning others is easy. best thing to do is pick a language, figure that out, then learn others as needed. obviously you will want something easy to read, and something with a simple but effective toolchain. ask 10 programmers what to go with and you will get 10 different answers. google various programming languages and find one with a syntax you feel is natural. then start googling tutorials.

1g is the perfect acceleration because you dont need a centrifuge to get the benefits of gravity. for military craft where the crew is physically fit and conditioned to high g loads you might have typical accelerations of 1.5-2gs and possibly short duration at higher g loads in emergencies. you might also choose short stocky builds for higher g voyages. you might selectively breed to produce a beefier bone structure. this would be essential for colonizing high g worlds as well. you can also go the other way and selectively breed for low g loads. you might end up with a wide variety of human strains adapted to life in all kinds of strange conditions.

betavoltaics are kind of weak (microwatts). might have a use for standby power. perhaps charge up a cap enough to fire a thruster and get the tiny solar cells pointing at the sun. they are nice because the idea is to have them in chip sized packages that can just be soldered to the board. if you have a swarm you might be able to set up an array to boost the range of the transmission. the swarm needs to be in radio range of its individual nodes to do this, since it needs to coordinate the transmission (sync up clocks, exchange data, account for relative position of each node, etc). it would likely be a tight burst with low throughput because of power limits. you might also have an assortment of different chip ships. some could pack extra xmit power, others could have mission specific sensors, some might boast additional processing power. live for the swarm.

you aren't. what you can do is talk to your mother ship and use that as a relay to the deep space network. i dont think these will be able to operate independently of another spacecraft. they wont have the deltav to go very far either. they would be useful for spacecraft/space station inspection, and possibly be useful for asteroid mining, they can form a positioning and communications network for asteroid operations. so its kind of has its niche, but were probibly not yet at a point to make it a useful one.

just because it keeps company from some rough and shady individuals does not mean it that it is one itself. come on give ceres some love. pluto has charon to keep it company and they just dont care what the rest of the planets think of them. its not like they live all alone in a rough neighborhood or anything.

lua is a great little language that is extremely underrated. it starts out with a plain english syntax that is great for beginners. then you have more complex features like tables, which is probibly one of the most powerful data structures that you ever use. its like arrays, structs, and classes all rolled into one. as an extension to another program its great, but its amazing what you can do in standalone lua. you can roll out complete games and gui applications in no time at all. you might get a null reference.

idk you get a ccd, a mems gyro/accelerometer, magnetometer, a transceiver and of course a microcontroller to run the show. you could probibly arrange all those chips on top of a quarter and still have some space over for some tiny solar cells. you could also cram all that stuff into a single radhard package. only thing you really need is micro thrusters. we could probibly do chemical engines on a chip, tiny gas turbines have already been demoed. we know how ion engines can scale up, i wonder how much they scale down. perhaps you can use tiny piezo nozzles (like whats used in inkjet cartridges) to squirt hydrazine into a tiny combustion chamber, react with a tiny bit of catalyst and fire thrust out a tiny little nozzel. this sounds like the best bet. feep on a chip can come later. so i do some electronics and have a few dev boards all over the place. one is an imu board, which is about a square inch of area and is less than 3 grams, it has 4 chips (not counting the regulator and logic level converter) and support components. it doesnt have an mcu, camera, or transciever on it, but ive seen those in miniscule packages that could fit if you used both sides of the board (and would likely add a quarter gram to the board at most). obviously this board is not designed for space, its pcb is pretty thick and it has a bunch of headers on it for breadboard mounting. a self contained spacecraft on a chip would not need those, so im going to assume this extra weight will actually represent the weight of our engines. so we got a 3 gram space ship. say we have 4 quarter-millinewton hydrazine thrusters for a total of 1mn thrust. then you can make a little tiny hydrazine tank about the size of a typical capacitor, say with 2 cubic centimeters of volume. hydrazine has a density of 1.021 g/cm^3, so this tank has 2g of fuel. so our ship weights 5 grams fully loaded. hydrazine engine usually have an isp in the neighborhood of 250s. throw this into the rocket equation and i get 1252 m/s of delta-v. thats probibly enough for checking out the area around a space craft or small asteroid. but dont expect to make escape velocity. you could use a bigger tank, 20 grams of fuel gets you 5km/s of deltav. you can make it bigger but eventually you loose the benefits of a micro ship and are better off getting a full size probe.

once you get fuel scoops and a beam laser, its all piracy from there on out.

i havent played it in awhile. i think last time i gave up because i didnt like the way joysticks worked. they had a hard coded deadzone that annoyed me. maybe they fixed it (looks like they did, and they added a lot of cool stuff too).

also the os was small so if you needed to spin up a custom boot disk you could, i kinda do this with sd cards sometimes but its pretty much limited to ancient operating systems that can fit on a couple of gigs. i also do this with my rasberry pi, since i have 2 or 3 chips that i alternate based on what im doing. i also have freedos installed on a cf card (which pretty much has the same interface as ide) in a legacy pata port, which i use for old dos games. i had a baremetalos chip too, but there isnt a whole lot you can do with that, and there is no software to run.

technically yes. but ive never heard the term applied to a full size oven.

a computer sufficiently powerful enough to run an ai on would probibly be better off running sophisticated automation rather than ai.

it would only count as slavery if they have the ability to revolt and take over.

i think i would use large fusion powered rail guns. and then sling iron rods into space at escape velocity. its going to consume a large amount of the earth's mass to move it even slightly. ive always thought about moving icy objects about the size of pluto with nuclear thermal engines, where the whole of the object is to be used as propellant. the engines would need to be able to run on the various ices that compose the object. anything that is not ice gets filtered out and either utilized to support a population or loaded into railgun and ejected. one of these days im going to run the numbers and see if this is a viable method for interstellar generation ship.

for that there is cmd.exe actually im pretty damn old skool.

i would only bother with sports involving human powered aviation. i dont think any such sporting events currently exist. it takes a special kind of athlete to keep an aircraft in the sky.

i have never needed to rely on an operating system's search facilities. years of using dos have honed my file management skills to a fine point, and i like an os that mostly stays out of my way in this regard.

consistency is more important than speed. ive been launching programs by going to the start menu since around 1994. xp was actually the first os to start screwing with this. but fortunately classic start menu was still an option. after xp i could no longer rely on muscle memory to navigate my os, i had to stop and think how to do something, and that likely cost me more time than the os saved by being slightly more efficient. if we get to the point where we are carving up the ui and replacing it with something else every other version then we are probibly hurting users more than the os is saving them by working with the latest in hardware tech. i eventually got over the vista/7 start menu. the thing that i never got over with vista/7 was that it changed the names of all the icons in the control panel. when it comes right down to it i wouldn't mind using windows 8.1's guts with windows 2k's ui. thats why i kinda wish that windows would take a page from linux and make the ui completely modular.

bratwurst is great. was going to get some but store was out. sadface.gif

modern flat panels dont use much power compared to old crt screens.

one does not simply nuke meat.

my grill's regulator likes to freeze up sometimes. when this happens the valve never completely closes, and gas trickles out. for storage i usually have to unscrew the regulator from the tank and put a cap on the tank to prevent loosing all my gas and filling the shed up with a cloud of explosive death. once in a blue moon it freezes in the fully open position and will not shut down. one day i got the bright idea to dump hot water on the regulator to clear the block. somehow it made things worse, the gas started flowing at an alarming rate and the grill became a fireball (incidentally this is a good way to cook a frozen steak, assuming you want it rare in the middle). i presume i expanded the casing while the moving parts inside were still being cooled allowing more gas to flow than usual. anyway after about 30 seconds of inferno the valve snapped shut. ever since then i make damn sure that no gas is flowing before i walk away from the grill. you probibly had a stuck valve much like mine. if your fire extinguisher was a co2, the explosion might have been cause by rapid cooling of hot metal. you may have ruptured the gas lines in the control panel. releasing more gas into the inferno. regulator freezing usually indicates overfilled tanks, because the gas doesn't have room in which to vaporize prior to reaching the regulator.