Procyon was amongst the first of Earth's off world colonies. Planted centuries ago by slower-than-light colony ships, before the discovery of jump drive. The earliest population was from Earth's European continent. These people are known as the "Old Andorians". In the centuries since, most immigrants have come …
Jump Drives are the only known means of faster than light travel. They allow spacecraft to travel through a wormhole that follows a "jump chord" between two nearby stars. Jump-1 chords connect stars up to 1 parsec apart. the chord has a well defined start and end point, usually within …
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Until recently, Earth was dominated by a vast computer network called the "Virtuality". Over the centuries, hundreds of billions of people uploaded their minds into this "life after death". Eventually, living people came to be a minority who were largely excluded from decision-making. Out in the living …
Apparently Twitter has been a-tweet over David Ramsey's list of "20 Things the Rich Do Every Day". Ben Irwin has posted a pointed ripose, but the original post is a hoot.
The controversial list isn't all that bad. There are a handful of good points ("81% of wealthy maintain a …
View comments more ...I use rsync for backups, and it has a very nice feature, where it uses hard-links to a reference directory tree, in order to reduce space. That works well, but sometimes the chain of links is broken, and disk space gets used up unnecessarily. The most common cause is when …
View comments more ...I'm having second thoughts about using Polyisocyanurate (PIR) boards for our external wall insulation (EWI). PIR is the best commonly available insulator, so it will enable us to get the most insulation into the limited thickness that we have available. Unfortunately, I've just learned that PIR has some problems that …
View comments more ...Excellent advice from fostertom on external wall insulation (EWI):
The ideal is EWI to walls, continuous with similar EPS [expanded polystyrene] on OSB [a kind of plywood] boarded over the top of the rafters, tiles/slates replaced but a bit higher up. The roof OSB is adequately airtight, without any …View comments more ...
Me (calling ICICI bank): Hello, I'm trying to open a savings account, but when I click next on your form, it says "Address information cannot have special characters" - but I can't see any special characters in any of the fields I've entered.
ICICI bank: Hello sir. I'm very sorry for …
View comments more ...This. I like this: http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/06/16/ultimate-tic-tac-toe/
It's a variant of boring old tic-tac-toe that is actually interesting. I want to give it a go.
View comments more ...The Washington Post recently published the results of a survey that purports to show that:
the public backs giving the federal government broad authority to investigate terrorist threats, even extending to the NSA program that monitors phone records
Their first question shows a 2:1 split in favour of the …
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