XKCD: It's more than a comic

Actually, I've spoken to a couple astronomers who're of the opinion that Venus is probably our best bet for planetary colonization. Obviously, the surface is a nightmare, but if you set up floating colonies at high altitude (probably tethered to the ground by carbon nanotube cables so they don't get blown all over the place,) you can easily keep the inside at earthlike temperatures, with gravity approximately equal to earth's (living in Martian gravity in the long term probably isn't healthy for humans,) and you can harvest a lot of energy and resources straight out of the atmosphere.

I remember something like that, although the version I saw had then untethered, because (a) making a tether that can survive the atmosphere is difficult at best, and (b) if they're free-floating and you're good enough with convincing them to go where you want you can get them to circle the planet at just the right speed to simulate a 24-hour day.

Except for the wonderful rain of acid.

I'm curious, have we had anything comparable to this?

(The page he's talking about is well worth checking out, incidentally)

Edit wars over the capitalization for a namespace? Haven't seen anything that big yet

Well, we, of course, sidestep the issue of capitalization entirely.

*

edited 29th Jan '13 10:04:11 PM by Gilphon

Not really. If anything it's just harder to change here, since you'd have to look for every wick if you wanted to enforce a "change".

Nope, you just customize the title.

Also, we have main.redirects :V

There are plenty of substances which can resist sulfuric acid. The sulfuric acid could even be useful, since you can get a lot of energy out of it.

Obviously, you don't want the floating colonies to be open to the atmosphere, everyone inside would die, but that's going to be true of colonies pretty much anywhere else in the solar system.

Best comment on that wikipedia talk page (following someone mentioning that Munroe owns the account User:Xkcd):

edited 30th Jan '13 6:58:06 AM by EdwardsGrizzly

I figured you had accounted for that, but felt like mentioning it anyway.

So, I'm not the only one struggling to know when to put a capital letter or not in a title.

Eh.

http://xkcd.com/1168/

http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=100061

Nice knowing you all :V

edited 1st Feb '13 6:15:25 AM by AceOfScarabs

Took me a while, but I was able to recall "tar -xvzf whatever.tar.gz". Though I still had to double-check with Google.

Though if you only have ten seconds, I'm not sure googling it can save you anyway.

Um... "tar --help" is valid, right?

edited 1st Feb '13 7:41:05 AM by Tangent128

On a technicality, I would say so, yes.

Depends on how they implemented the thing, of course.

I used to have so much fun with tar. Nowadays I couldn't do it without the manual, just because it's been so long since I touched a Unixy system.

tar -[xctu][zj]?f filename

That's what I know about it without a manual, and most of the time it's enough. Also, —help is risky, because some programs don't understand it, and only accept -h or -?. Sometimes all three, sometimes none.

http://xkcd.com/1169/

http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=100124

Heh, that actually sounds like fun. And possibly something I might have tried before, but I don't really remember.

Sounds kinda like Map Crunch, though that one uses Street View.

Darn it, I'm supposed to be working. Anyway, interesting site.

Oh, I've done this a lot of times before. :3

I've occasionally enjoyed putting in weird routes in Google Maps to see what it tells me to do. Of course, everyone knows by now that if you put in a destination that requires you to cross the ocean, it instructs you to "kayak across the Pacific" or some such. Still, it's amusing to see.