> If you do pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering
> or math-related field, the Force will be with us! Remember, the
> Death Star's power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system,
> is insignificant next to the power of the Force.I guess we're going to have to wait until the Republicans are back in the executive branch.
"You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.
"Fools.
"The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy."
- Sam Hughes, "How to destroy the Earth" - http://qntm.org/destroy
"The momentum would be enough to knock the Earth into a different orbit—but the Earth is no more. The energy deposited is ten thousand times greater than the planet’s gravitational binding energy, and the planet is blown into an expanding cloud of plasma, with a particularly energetic streamer extending away from the far side of the impact site, out into space."
Sigh. I laughed at this, it's a fun and smart response targeted to a sub-community that barely broke the threshold to get that response.
But let's be real. If your standard of 'blowing up the planet' is somewhat lesser than 'the Republicans'...it might make you feel better to say it but history shows both of them are plenty happy dropping bombs for no justifiable reason.
Paul Shawcross is still a long way from making amends for what he's done to help cripple our human space flight program, however.
And what is it you think he did, exactly? Just curious.
Is 96 the real number? Since the search bar always says 'featured responses'. When you click the bottom bar to see more responses it does some delayed-JS-scroll action and shows all of 8 more results.
Unless you're really trying to increase the drop-off rate on each click, why make it so crappy? How many sites set their pagination to 8 items, unless they want users to linger on what was just delivered?
They don't seem to be very serious about the petition site. Good PR, and I guess I'm glad they have the option, but it's kind of a joke.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/responses/more/all/12/2/0
Here are a few more I've found poking around:
[1] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/responses/more/all/1/3/3 [2] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/responses/more/all/1/3/4
Maybe there's a documented API somewhere, but the queries seem to follow a pattern ala:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/responses/more/all/[$pageID...
Is it? It seems to lead to a lot of discontent when petitions don't get the response people want.
I think this is a great development. As a DC resident, I can attest to everyone here taking themselves far too seriously.
The White House blog doesn't link to the source article, so here it is:
http://www.centives.net/S/2012/how-much-would-it-cost-to-bui...
Estimated cost of death star $850,000,000,000,000,000
Estimated current US debt $16,437,339,543,399
Cost of Death Star per US citizen $2,705,101,099
Estimated US debt per US citizen $52,311
($50k/$2.9 trillion government taxation revenue * my approximate tax paid yearly = $0.00043)
One afternoon of this guy's time at $50,000 would mean an annual salary of $26,100,000.
(261 workdays per year * 2 * $50,000)
In all likelihood, this was either done on this guy's own time or took like an hour....
Time well spent if you ask me :)
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/assign-nasa-do-fea...
Seriously though, all it takes is a bunch of Star Wars reference to garner a bunch of Likes? No wonder there are so many actors in politics.
"We're working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it."
Somehow that feels like vaporware.