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Enjoy your game of wack-a-mole.

If only there was a way to use e-mail as a group communication tool. To have a list of members of a group who's messages could be handled by a server as a group. Instead of sending an e-mail to the content creator directly. It would go something like this:

You'd get an email from a mailing list service about the new video.
You could respond to that message with comments. Your e-mail would be sent to the whole group subscribed to the "list-service" and would be properly threaded.

We could call the whole thing something short and snappy like "list-serv"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The SCOTUS case TC Heartland vs Kraft of 2017 ruled that patent litigants can no longer "forum shop" for jurisdictions that are friendly to their case, they can only file patent infringement cases in jurisdictions where the defendant has a physical presence. This ruling was aimed squarely at non-practicing entities (the polite term for "patent trolls") who almost unilaterally selected East Texas district or Delaware to file their infringement cases.

Apple won't admit it, but the closure of the stores in the East Texas district was a strategic legal move to exploit the SCOTUS precedent and shield themselves from the patent courts that are all too well known to rule in favor for patent litigants - and for the patent trolls Apple is currently battling.

El Internado is from Spain and it's really good. Although it's a very long-form show and I've only had time for one episode so far.

Do you agree it's not that simple, or are you an absolutist, denying any complexity?

As with all rights—yours, mine, or otherwise—none are absolute in their scope and strength. My reason for asserting a business' (non-absolute) ability to choose its own business offerings is because you have seemingly been taking the opposing absolutist stance: that businesses have "no rights" at all. Clearly they have some rights, otherwise you'd be able to walk into a bank and demand a 2000% interest rate for your saving account or walk into a French restaurant and demand that they serve sushi.

Chosing [sic] not to distribute your own content, based on the content, is self-censorship.

Agreed. But as you said next, that's not what happening here, so I'm not sure why we're continuing to talk about something that we agree is irrelevant.

But that's not what's happening here: it's about refusing to allow targeted advertising to a specific demographic. They are censoring the advertisements

I agree that they are "refusing to allow targeted advertising to a specific demographic", but I don't see how you made the mental leap from that to "they are censoring the advertisements". Advertisers can still run those same ads in the same quantities. No one is being censored here.

If you're not an absolutist, how do you balance the rights of the owners vs the rights of the customers?

The rights of one extend insomuch as they don't trample the rights of others, which has the corollary that in the absence of others' rights, one's rights reign supreme. When rights bump against each other, the courts have drawn the line such that the stronger right is protected. It's the reason why yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater is illegal: you're trampling on the right to life and health of the other patrons. Likewise, most of your examples (e.g. eHarmony) involved businesses violating the rights of others, hence why they were compelled to change.

But I'm trying to get you to recognize that this is a two-way street: businesses have rights too.

Despite your assertion that publicly-owned businesses have no rights, businesses (public or not) have a well-established right to "business expression". It's far weaker than an individual's right to personal expression, but it's the reason why you can't walk into a bank and demand a savings account with a 2000% interest rate or walk into a French restaurant and demand sushi. Those demands—which you are free to express but which you have no right to receive—would trample their rights, hence why they need not heed your unreasonable demands.

In the absence of others' rights being trampled, a business' rights—weak as they may be—reign supreme, so they have the ability to choose their own business offerings. That's why they can kick out unruly customers, why they can post "no shirt, no shoes, no service" signs, and why they can choose not to hire unqualified candidates. Likewise, it's why Facebook can choose to drop an option from what they offer advertisers. Doing so violates no one's rights, so it's Facebook's choice to make.

To me, one draws the line at privately owned, where the rights of the owners should prevail, vs a publicly traded corporation

We're getting pretty far afield of what's relevant, but I'll respond anyway. While the rights (e.g. artistic expression) of privately-owned businesses are certainly stronger than those of public ones when it comes to matters such as these (e.g. the landmark Hobby Lobby case that upheld their rights), those rights aren't absolute. For instance, the landmark case that cemented the federal government's ability to enforce desegregation in private businesses was against a privately-owned

Do you agree it's not that simple, or are you an absolutist, denying any complexity?

As with all rights—yours, mine, or otherwise—none are absolute in their scope and strength. My reason for asserting a business' (non-absolute) ability to choose its own business offerings is because you have seemingly been taking the opposing absolutist stance: that businesses have "no rights" at all. Clearly they have some rights, otherwise you'd be able to walk into a bank and demand a 2000% interest rate for your saving account or walk into a French restaurant and demand that they serve sushi.

Chosing [sic] not to distribute your own content, based on the content, is self-censorship.

Agreed. But as you said next, that's not what happening here, so I'm not sure why we're continuing to talk about something that we agree is irrelevant.

But that's not what's happening here: it's about refusing to allow targeted advertising to a specific demographic. They are censoring the advertisements

I agree that they are "refusing to allow targeted advertising to a specific demographic", but I don't see how you made the mental leap from that to "they are censoring the advertisements". Advertisers can still run those same ads in the same quantities. No one is being censored here.

If you're not an absolutist, how do you balance the rights of the owners vs the rights of the customers?

The rights of one extend insomuch as they don't trample the rights of others, which has the corollary that in the absence of others' rights, one's rights reign supreme. When rights bump against each other, the courts have drawn the line such that the stronger right is protected. It's the reason why yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater is illegal: you're trampling on the right to life and health of the other patrons. Likewise, most of your examples (e.g. eHarmony) involved businesses violating the rights of others, hence why they were compelled to change.

But I'm trying to get you to recognize that this is a two-way street: businesses have rights too.

Despite your assertion that publicly-owned businesses have no rights, businesses (public or not) have a well-established right to "business expression". It's far weaker than an individual's right to personal expression, but it's the reason why you can't walk into a bank and demand a savings account with a 2000% interest rate or walk into a French restaurant and demand sushi. Those demands—which you are free to express but which you have no right to receive—would trample their rights, hence why they need not heed your unreasonable demands.

In the absence of others' rights being trampled, a business' rights—weak as they may be—reign supreme, so they have the ability to choose their own business offerings. That's why they can kick out unruly customers, why they can post "no shirt, no shoes, no service" signs, and why they can choose not to hire unqualified candidates. Likewise, it's why Facebook can choose to drop an option from what they offer advertisers. Doing so violates no one's rights, so it's Facebook's choice to make.

To me, one draws the line at privately owned, where the rights of the owners should prevail, vs a publicly traded corporation

We're getting pretty far afield of what's relevant, but I'll respond anyway. While the rights (e.g. artistic expression) of privately-owned businesses are certainly stronger than those of public ones when it comes to matters such as these (e.g. the landmark Hobby Lobby case that upheld their rights), those rights aren't absolute. For instance, the landmark case that cemented the federal government's ability to enforce desegregation in private businesses was against a privately-owned

Crikey, these young'uns. What's wrong with plugboards?

I've been programming for the past ~40 years and I'll try to summarize what I believe are the most important bits about programming (pardon the pun.) Think of this as a META: "HOWTO: Be A Great Programmer" summary. (I'll get to the books section in a bit.)

1. All code can be summarized as a trinity of 3 fundamental concepts:

* Linear; that is, sequence: A, B, C
* Cyclic; that is, unconditional jumps: A-B-C-goto B
* Choice; that is, conditional jumps: if A then B

2. ~80% of programming is NOT about code; it is about Effective Communication. Whether that be:

* with your compiler / interpreter / REPL
* with other code (levels of abstraction, level of coupling, separation of concerns, etc.)
* with your boss(es) / manager(s)
* with your colleagues
* with your legal team
* with your QA dept
* with your customer(s)
* with the general public

The other ~20% is effective time management and design. A good programmer knows how to budget their time. Programming is about balancing the three conflicting goals of the Program Management Triangle: You can have it on time, on budget, on quality. Pick two.

3. Stages of a Programmer

There are two old jokes:

In Lisp all code is data. In Haskell all data is code.

And:

Progression of a (Lisp) Programmer:

* The newbie realizes that the difference between code and data is trivial.
* The expert realizes that all code is data.
* The true master realizes that all data is code.

(Attributed to Aristotle Pagaltzis)

The point of these jokes is that as you work with systems you start to realize that a data-driven process can often greatly simplify things.

4. Know Thy Data

Fred Books once wrote

"Show me your flowcharts (source code), and conceal your tables (domain model), and I shall continue to be mystified; show me your tables (domain model) and I won't usually need your flowcharts (source code): they'll be obvious."

A more modern version would read like this:

Show me your code and I'll have to see your data,
Show me your data and I won't have to see your code.

The importance of data can't be understated:

* Optimization STARTS with understanding HOW the data is being generated and used, NOT the code as has been traditionally taught.
* Post 2000 "Big Data" has been called the new oil. We are generating upwards to millions of GB of data every second. Analyzing that data is import to spot trends and potential problems.

5. There are three levels of optimizations. From slowest to fastest run-time:

a) Bit-twiddling hacks
b) Algorithmic -- Algorithmic complexity or Analysis of algorithms (such as Big-O notation)
c) Data-Orientated Design -- Understanding how hardware caches such as instruction and data caches matter. Optimize for the common case, NOT the single case that OOP tends to favor.

Optimizing is understanding Bang-for-the-Buck. 80% of code execution is spent in 20% of the time. Speeding up hot-spots with bit twiddling won't be as effective as using a more efficient algorithm which, in turn, won't be as efficient as understanding HOW the data is manipulated in the first place.

6. Fundamental Reading

Since the OP specifically asked about books -- there are lots of great ones. The ones that have impressed me that I would mark as "required" reading:

* The Mythical Man-Month
* Godel, Escher, Bach
* Knuth: The Art of Computer Programming
* The Pragmatic Programmer
* Zero Bugs and Program Faster
* Writing Solid Code / Code Comp

I've been programming for the past ~40 years and I'll try to summarize what I believe are the most important bits about programming (pardon the pun.) Think of this as a META: "HOWTO: Be A Great Programmer" summary. (I'll get to the books section in a bit.)

1. All code can be summarized as a trinity of 3 fundamental concepts:

* Linear; that is, sequence: A, B, C
* Cyclic; that is, unconditional jumps: A-B-C-goto B
* Choice; that is, conditional jumps: if A then B

2. ~80% of programming is NOT about code; it is about Effective Communication. Whether that be:

* with your compiler / interpreter / REPL
* with other code (levels of abstraction, level of coupling, separation of concerns, etc.)
* with your boss(es) / manager(s)
* with your colleagues
* with your legal team
* with your QA dept
* with your customer(s)
* with the general public

The other ~20% is effective time management and design. A good programmer knows how to budget their time. Programming is about balancing the three conflicting goals of the Program Management Triangle: You can have it on time, on budget, on quality. Pick two.

3. Stages of a Programmer

There are two old jokes:

In Lisp all code is data. In Haskell all data is code.

And:

Progression of a (Lisp) Programmer:

* The newbie realizes that the difference between code and data is trivial.
* The expert realizes that all code is data.
* The true master realizes that all data is code.

(Attributed to Aristotle Pagaltzis)

The point of these jokes is that as you work with systems you start to realize that a data-driven process can often greatly simplify things.

4. Know Thy Data

Fred Books once wrote

"Show me your flowcharts (source code), and conceal your tables (domain model), and I shall continue to be mystified; show me your tables (domain model) and I won't usually need your flowcharts (source code): they'll be obvious."

A more modern version would read like this:

Show me your code and I'll have to see your data,
Show me your data and I won't have to see your code.

The importance of data can't be understated:

* Optimization STARTS with understanding HOW the data is being generated and used, NOT the code as has been traditionally taught.
* Post 2000 "Big Data" has been called the new oil. We are generating upwards to millions of GB of data every second. Analyzing that data is import to spot trends and potential problems.

5. There are three levels of optimizations. From slowest to fastest run-time:

a) Bit-twiddling hacks
b) Algorithmic -- Algorithmic complexity or Analysis of algorithms (such as Big-O notation)
c) Data-Orientated Design -- Understanding how hardware caches such as instruction and data caches matter. Optimize for the common case, NOT the single case that OOP tends to favor.

Optimizing is understanding Bang-for-the-Buck. 80% of code execution is spent in 20% of the time. Speeding up hot-spots with bit twiddling won't be as effective as using a more efficient algorithm which, in turn, won't be as efficient as understanding HOW the data is manipulated in the first place.

6. Fundamental Reading

Since the OP specifically asked about books -- there are lots of great ones. The ones that have impressed me that I would mark as "required" reading:

* The Mythical Man-Month
* Godel, Escher, Bach
* Knuth: The Art of Computer Programming
* The Pragmatic Programmer
* Zero Bugs and Program Faster
* Writing Solid Code / Code Comp

No, one particle per cubic METRE is the density of intergalactic space. The density of interstellar space i.e. the space between the stars in a galaxy, is variable but averages to about 1 million particles per cubic metre which is the same as one particle per cubic centimetre.

I have serious doubts about this study too but to be fair though cavemen from the palaeolithic had a life expectancy of 33 years so while I doubt this was due to air pollution, other things killed them off so rapidly that if there were any effect from air pollution we would not notice.

The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric Raymond

and

Expert Programming: Deep C Secrets

The former does a good job, I thought, of outlining what it means to program in the UNIX style. The latter is perfect for a geek like me who wants to learn all about the ins/outs of semantics of a language that I love!

Nineteen Eighty-Four. Hey, you didn't specify computer programming....

I said that from the GP's argument that any contract two people enter into is valid that it naturally follows that slavery contracts should be allowed.

The Strawman in your argument is that I've said employment is exactly equal to slavery.

At the moment it's not, but it has been in the past. As for Rape, same deal. It wasn't too long ago that women were forced into "Marriage" on a routine basis.

Basically, everything is just a matter of degree. At the moment very few people are coerced to the extremes of rape and slavery, but just because it happens to be like that right now doesn't mean we can't regress, or that a significant portion of the electorate and ruling class isn't actively working on that regression.

The spacecraft was placed into Earth orbit by a SpaceX rocket. It looks like it was a secondary payload on a telecommunications satellite launch, which probably means that the SpaceX rocket placed it in Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO), an elliptical orbit with a peak altitude of 36,000 km.

The Israeli spacecraft then, having separated from the primary payload, presumably performed the trans-lunar injection burn - raising its apogee to ~380,000 km - on its own. I think it's valid to describe that as launching it to the moon. Sure, it doesn't require as much delta-v as putting it in orbit in the first place, but it is the step that changes it from "not going to the moon" to "going to the moon".

The spacecraft was placed into Earth orbit by a SpaceX rocket. It looks like it was a secondary payload on a telecommunications satellite launch, which probably means that the SpaceX rocket placed it in Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO), an elliptical orbit with a peak altitude of 36,000 km.

The Israeli spacecraft then, having separated from the primary payload, presumably performed the trans-lunar injection burn - raising its apogee to ~380,000 km - on its own. I think it's valid to describe that as launching it to the moon. Sure, it doesn't require as much delta-v as putting it in orbit in the first place, but it is the step that changes it from "not going to the moon" to "going to the moon".

See also the Sleepless series of novels by Nancy Kress. A modification for one thing turns out to have a bunch of different enhancing side effects, leading eventually to a deep division between the "are" and "are nots"

Sounds like something Racter might have come up with.

Eve (S01E11)

If life continues to imitate art, we can expect the twins to develop superhuman intelligence and strength, as well as homicidal psychoses.

No wired network is a killer in some settings.

Do you think these use cases are ones Apple actually gives a shit about?

Only on Slashdot has the disappearance of built in RJ45 somehow become an Apple issue.

Apple laptops don't have have DB9 serial ports, parallel ports or built in firewire ports either.

For those who care there are USB-C and Thunderbolt docking stations available and they work fine. Personally I'm with you and would rather have a 8P8C ethernet port built in but clearly I'm not the customer Apple is courting.

And for my purposes, I'd like a DB9 serial port on laptops as well. But alas, I fear that the availability of inexpensive adapters make these edge cases addressable. My new tricked out Dell 5530 Workstation laptop requires adapters for Old school USB, RJ45, and HDMI.

This is the direction that laptops are going. And not just Apple.

Just blame the pedestrian for being in the way of the new type of transit.

Here are a few more instances of APK's mental instabilities over the years on the internet:
Wikipedia edits by APK.
What to do when someone threatens to sue you on the internet.
When he gets caught in a straight up lie.
Then there are his statements on hosts and port filtering.

All censorship starts with good intentions (or at least what its authors think are good intentions).

1) Censorship is only illegal as it applies to the government. Private companies have NO legal obligation to give you a platform to say whatever idiotic thing you want and never have. You can say what you want but you have never had a legal right to say whatever you want in any location or platform you choose. The newspaper is under no obligation to print whatever fool thing you want to say and neither is Facebook or Pinterest or Twitter or Instagram if it runs contrary to their interests. I fail to see any compelling interest Pinterest might have in promoting quackery that could conceivably result in liability for them.
2) Spreading provably false psuedo-science as "information" that demonstrably leads to the sickness & deaths isn't protected free speech under any legal framework. The only reason it doesn't get prosecuted is because it is difficult to tie the action to a specific instance of harm. Anti-vaxxers are engaging in quackery which is quite illegal and definitely not protected speech.

There's also Dirty Pair. (should be SFW)

I swear, if the first moon base is not called "Moonbase Alpha" I'm going to be really pissed off.

Forced-vax nazis sure do love excluding classes of people they dislike from public facilities in the name of private pooperty.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

If one mutation confers HIV resistance, AND higher intelligence... why doesn't everyone have this mutation?

Because it's a fairly recent mutation, on evolutionary scales, and it takes a long time to propagate even when there's a selection advantage against an infectious disease. The Wikipedia article on the gene gives a bit on this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It also sounds like the advantage to intelligence is subtle. There was also not much of an intelligence advantage when much of human society consisted of subsistence farmers. Someone that had an education from those in walking distance, with few able to read, with superstition often being the norm than any real science, and generally a difficult life, there wasn't much to gain from being smarter than the average bear.

It seems that also there is an advantage with having only one of the genes. It might not be as effective against infection or grant as much of an intelligence boost but there is still an advantage. This will slow propagation as they still carry a gene without this CCR5 deletion.

Also, think of a possible heterozygous advantage such as with sickle cell trait. Sickle cell trait is "good" for heterozygous people as the reduction in oxygen flow is minimal, but carries a tolerance for malaria. Homozygous people for sickle cell trait can have a painful and short life without modern medical care. Lacking the sickle trait means nearly certain death where malaria is prevalent, again unless given access to modern medical care. The CCR5 deletion may be advantageous to a point but leave someone vulnerable in another way.

If there is any disadvantage to the CCR5 deletion then it might soon be considered a disease like sickle cell trait is today. Modern medicine has rendered HIV a chronic condition, much like sickle cell trait. It's not a death sentence any more. It's expensive to treat but very survivable. We don't need this gene to survive HIV. If there is any downside to it then that would explain it's slow propagation.

Forced-vax nazis sure do love silencing dissent in the digital public square.

Do you also support "free speech zones"?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

...whoever does the grubbermint's job.

When Google behaves as a grubbermint, they become a grubbermint. If Google doesn't want to be morally responsible for other people's freedom of speech, Google should not put themselves in the position of controlling people's speech.

Freedom isn't a black-and-white thing. If I put a sign on my lawn with a picture of my cat, I'm having negligible impact on anyone else's freedom of speech. If I tell my friends that they can put signs on my lawn (anything they like, so long as they aren't pictures of poodles), I start to have a small but measurable impact on somebody's freedom of speech. If I own 95% of the billboards in town, and declare that no pictures of poodles are allowed on them, I'm having a significant impact on the residents' freedom of speech - though still, of course, not as much as if I were a government and went around arresting people for publicly displaying inappropriate dog pictures.

The greater my influence, the greater my moral responsibility for the freedom of those in my care - whether I like it or not, and regardless of what legal responsibilities I do or do not have. Which makes for an interesting paradox: one can provide a service that enables people to communicate when they would otherwise be unable, and in so doing, cause a net decrease in those people's freedom of communication.

Gundam Seed comes to mind. There the normal humans eventually discover a procedure to create enhanced humans they called coordinators. They had better reflexes, better intelligence, more resistance to disease, and were stronger. Once the secret was out it led to resentment and eventually war.

In the anime there is the downside of the Coordinators having difficulty having children, though I'm guessing at some point someone will figure out something that perhaps doesn't do the whole package, but does make a difference, perhaps with no downsides at all. I could easily see the elite having designer babies. Just because something is illegal in one country doesn't mean it will be everywhere. A person only has to be born in a particular country for citizenship. Everything else can be anywhere. Of course I tend to think of it as a bad idea, but it would hardly be the kids fault.

You do know about Paris, Ontario, right?

If it is then the Armageddon is overdue. We've had these custom personalised plates for a while.

Who's we? Somewhere else in Oz? Here in the states, the wackiest symbols I can think of are on the California "KIDS" plates, which offer hand, heart, star or plus sign symbols, only one of which can be used only once on your plates. Many states also have specialty plates with a variety of backgrounds, or with one special image printed on the plate next to the characters.

Think of how useful that would have been considering events like Lufthansa Flight 181 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
German experts and the SAS would have had a count of who was doing what, real time locations, their history, their faces and type of equipment.

Precipitation enters the suddenly not so closed boot as it finds itself precariously in the open position, evidently, during a precipitous occasion involving the fall of magic water from the sky.

Embracing the rather obvious opportunity to troll this outcome, when the weather rock is wet, anything you open is subject to a wetting.

We ached for video phone calls for decades [...]

I don't know of anyone who wished for video calls or uses them now that webcam hardware is so commonly available. I know of people who go to some effort to disable video in their calls (apparently including Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg who probably has access to a lot of webcams given how many people still use Facebook).

[...]but now that it's dead-easy we're all monkey about it. Grow up, humanity. Nobody cares about your mundane life.

Apparently the NSA and their many partners do, and trading data about people is very big business as well. The evidence from Ed Snowden alone is far more compelling than your summary and actually informative. Mass surveillance simply doesn't work as you claim. As Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras, and others have told us for years: mass surveillance is non-discriminatory. Data is collected en masse (NSA's strategy is "collect it all" not "collect some of the data"), decrypted, indexed, retained, and searched through later. The impression I got from Snowden's description was that much like someone using a web search engine, what's deemed interesting (what somebody "cares about") is decided at search time. So it's impossible to conclude that "Nobody cares about your mundane life" because the data you generate helps a lot of businesses every day. Another example is "LOVEINT"—people with access to this collected data using it to track what their love interests or spouses (current or former in both cases) are doing, perhaps another more clear-cut counterexample to your evidenceless claim.

As I write this your post is moderated "informative" but I can't find a single part of your post that points to any information or backs any of its claims with evidence.

Should we tax the shit out of tobacco and otherwise discourage it? Science says yes.

Not it doesn't. It says that tobacco is addictive and unhealthy. What we as citizens do with that information is politics. Science cannot answer the questions of politics and for very good reason (it reduces humans and citizens to factors of an experiment). Science can only help inform your decisions it cannot make them.

policy should be determined by science.

This is already the case in most cases. For example, the EPA has to have a scientific basis for any regulation they want (which Obama decided was too much of a burden and ignored). That is not the same as scientists using their position to push politics. For example, the Dickey Amendment. If you as a scientist can't keep your personal politics and position out of your research then you have no business doing said research.

I (and most people) are worried about global warming .. CO2 emissions are a problem.

Great. That doesn't tell you a solution that will solve the problem. Should we tax everyone until there are riots on the streets? Should we nationalize energy and bankrupt the economy like Venezuela? Should we kill off 2/3 of the human population to lower emissions? Should we outlaw all carbon emitting technologies? As far as science is concerned these "solutions" are equivalent because they attempt to get the same goal. An experiment to test on "reducing CO2". Humans are reduced to mere numbers and cogs to be factored and reduced to get an appropriate outcome. Scientists are human and are corruptible just the same as anyone else with power and therefore are not absolved of the reality of political power and decision making without appropriate checks and balances of political power.

Science is, simply put, how we learn things as a species.

Science is incapable of certain things. Like making choices for us. Science is a tool and like all tools are useful for their intended purpose but can be abused and corrupted.

Arguing that science shouldn't be a part of politics is essentially saying that we should use no facts or knowledge in support of public policies. Is that really what you want?

I never said don't use facts or knowledge that is your own straw-man misrepresentation of my position.

"Billionares" aren't illegal in this country, full stop.
Wealth makes it easier to avoid or mitigate the negative effects of breaking the law, but only to a degree.
For example, look at this guy. He's 80 and will be out of prison in 150 years.

Be fair, group 5 doesn't really exist either.

(The only people who believe "God wouldn't let them die" are those who follow Christian Science, which is a negligible minority.)

The Oh-My-God particle wasn't quite the equivalent of a hundred-mph fastball, closer to half of that. It was going about 99.[21 9s].5% of the speed of light.

Wow, that is the most interesting interpretation of "Yelling fire in a theater" I have ever heard. However, that is not how the majority of the people in USA would reference that saying since it has an actual historical reference.

The reference is to the Supreme Court Decision on the limiting of Free Speech and was used as part of the courts written decision as to the limits of free speech. An excerpt from the majorities decision is root of that saying:

"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. ... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree"

The Wikipedia version of the case is here (and I'm sure you can search the actual case law if you felt the need to do so):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So no, it is not an abused example! It is a reference to the Supreme Court Decision that to this day is used as precedent for determining the legal bounds of free speech in the USA.

What’s the point of self-lacing bricks anyway?

I am sure The Thing would have a use for them.

Since the formation of the state of Israel, Palestinians have been kicked out of their home, herded into internment or executed en masse. https://www.amnesty.org/en/cou... [amnesty.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Israel continues to perpetrate crimes against humanity and Slashdot is guilty of repeatedly normalizing an oppressor, as if everything is okay. When you steal land from a people, murder and execute en masse, deny them freedom and autonomy--especially when the oppressors went through went through the Shoah, you think there would be learning. I am disgusted with the Slashdot editors who collude with Israeli foreign policy and as such, they too are part of the problem and ongoing subjugation of a people. Free Occupied Palestine and hold the powerful to account. Israel is a nuclear armed state who takes billions in aid from the US and has a sophisticated military and continues to run of the largest concentration camps in the world. Slashdot readers, learn from Marek Edelman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Never forget what happened and do not let oppressors run amok and then get 'normalized' by our media.

Since the formation of the state of Israel, Palestinians have been kicked out of their home, herded into internment or executed en masse. https://www.amnesty.org/en/cou... [amnesty.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Israel continues to perpetrate crimes against humanity and Slashdot is guilty of repeatedly normalizing an oppressor, as if everything is okay. When you steal land from a people, murder and execute en masse, deny them freedom and autonomy--especially when the oppressors went through went through the Shoah, you think there would be learning. I am disgusted with the Slashdot editors who collude with Israeli foreign policy and as such, they too are part of the problem and ongoing subjugation of a people. Free Occupied Palestine and hold the powerful to account. Israel is a nuclear armed state who takes billions in aid from the US and has a sophisticated military and continues to run of the largest concentration camps in the world. Slashdot readers, learn from Marek Edelman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Never forget what happened and do not let oppressors run amok and then get 'normalized' by our media.

Since the formation of the state of Israel, Palestinians have been kicked out of their home, herded into internment or executed en masse. https://www.amnesty.org/en/cou... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Israel continues to perpetrate crimes against humanity and Slashdot is guilty of repeatedly normalizing an oppressor, as if everything is okay. When you steal land from a people, murder and execute en masse, deny them freedom and autonomy--especially when the oppressors went through went through the Shoah, you think there would be learning. I am disgusted with the Slashdot editors who collude with Israeli foreign policy and as such, they too are part of the problem and ongoing subjugation of a people. Free Occupied Palestine and hold the powerful to account. Israel is a nuclear armed state who takes billions in aid from the US and has a sophisticated military and continues to run of the largest concentration camps in the world. Slashdot readers, learn from Marek Edelman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Never forget what happened and do not let oppressors run amok and then get 'normalized' by our media.

Since the formation of the state of Israel, Palestinians have been kicked out of their home, herded into internment or executed en masse. https://www.amnesty.org/en/cou... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Israel continues to perpetrate crimes against humanity and Slashdot is guilty of repeatedly normalizing an oppressor, as if everything is okay. When you steal land from a people, murder and execute en masse, deny them freedom and autonomy--especially when the oppressors went through went through the Shoah, you think there would be learning. I am disgusted with the Slashdot editors who collude with Israeli foreign policy and as such, they too are part of the problem and ongoing subjugation of a people. Free Occupied Palestine and hold the powerful to account. Israel is a nuclear armed state who takes billions in aid from the US and has a sophisticated military and continues to run of the largest concentration camps in the world. Slashdot readers, learn from Marek Edelman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Never forget what happened and do not let oppressors run amok and then get 'normalized' by our media.

A hatred of "clear hateful ideas or narratives" itself constitute a clear hateful idea.

Actually I thought the lesson-learned from Fukushima was the 50hz vs 60hz divide needed to be fixed.
A localized disaster can quickly escalate into a national event if it overloads the converters.

guruevi stated position of the scientific community on the currently-unfolding global climate change as:

Our current model predicts a massive change, we don't know what that means or what will happen, but we probably have to do something

Mmm ... sort of.

The thing is, we do, in fact, know what that means, and what will happen, because it has happened before, at the end of the Permian Period, when a massive increase in greenhouse gas emissions created a cascade of events that eventually caused 70% of terrestrial species and as much as 96% of marine species to go extinct over a period of no more than 100,000 years.

What we don't know - because the increase in CO2 levels at the onset of the P-T extinction occured much, much more slowly than is the case in the current event - is how quickly what happened a quarter-billion years ago will happen in the current era. Back then, it may have taken as long as 20,000-50,000 years for CO2 to accumulate to sufficient levels to cause the ocean to warm up enough to melt the massive deposits of methane clathrates in its abyssal depths. That - along with the melting of arctic and antarctic permafrost - released an enormous quantity of methane into the atmosphere over a very short time. In turn, that sudden, massive, global methane release had two effects that were catastrophic for land species and downright apocalyptic for oceanic ones. First, the oceans abruptly became both acidic enough to dissolve the shells of bivalves, nautiluses, crustaceans, corals, and other exoskeletal creatures, and, at the same time, their upper layers also became highly anoxic to a sufficient depth to smother pretty much all the icthyoid and gelatinous ones. Secondly, temperatures on land soared to levels that killed off those species that were unable either to migrate to more suitable climes, or that were dependent for key parts of their food web on the species that had succumbed directly in response to the increased temperatures.

We also know that, even though the Great Dying began with a snap ice age, by its end, global temperatures had increased beyond the pre-ice-age average by approximately 10 degrees Centigrade. That was enough to completely melt the planet's ice caps, which led to a significant increase in global sea levels (by as much as 100 meters) and downright biblical floods, as a consequence.

Because CO2 persists in the atmosphere for 20,000 years or more under current conditions (and which will likely stick around still longer as the world's rain forests and wetland environments - which are critical CO2 sinks - continue to disappear), even once we, as a species, achieve zero net CO2 emissions (assuming, of course, that we ever actually do so), the climate-warming effects of the accumulated atmospheric load will continue to push global average temperatures upward for quite literally thousands of years to come.

And, given that the Arctic is already experiencing unprecedented methane emissions, both from deposits released by melting permafrost and from what does, in fact, appear to be melting clathrates at relatively shallow depths, the same kind of abrupt, massive atmospheric methane infusion that caused peak extinction in the P-T event may occur considerably sooner in the current one than climate models of even a few years ago predicted.

So, in broad terms, what is going to happen is well-known. The currently-unanswered questions are: how soon will it happen, and what will happen to our technological/industrial civilization as a result?

So, here's the good news, such as it is: although the climate - and the global ecology that depends on it - is going to radically change, and the e

guruevi stated position of the scientific community on the currently-unfolding global climate change as:

Our current model predicts a massive change, we don't know what that means or what will happen, but we probably have to do something

Mmm ... sort of.

The thing is, we do, in fact, know what that means, and what will happen, because it has happened before, at the end of the Permian Period, when a massive increase in greenhouse gas emissions created a cascade of events that eventually caused 70% of terrestrial species and as much as 96% of marine species to go extinct over a period of no more than 100,000 years.

What we don't know - because the increase in CO2 levels at the onset of the P-T extinction occured much, much more slowly than is the case in the current event - is how quickly what happened a quarter-billion years ago will happen in the current era. Back then, it may have taken as long as 20,000-50,000 years for CO2 to accumulate to sufficient levels to cause the ocean to warm up enough to melt the massive deposits of methane clathrates in its abyssal depths. That - along with the melting of arctic and antarctic permafrost - released an enormous quantity of methane into the atmosphere over a very short time. In turn, that sudden, massive, global methane release had two effects that were catastrophic for land species and downright apocalyptic for oceanic ones. First, the oceans abruptly became both acidic enough to dissolve the shells of bivalves, nautiluses, crustaceans, corals, and other exoskeletal creatures, and, at the same time, their upper layers also became highly anoxic to a sufficient depth to smother pretty much all the icthyoid and gelatinous ones. Secondly, temperatures on land soared to levels that killed off those species that were unable either to migrate to more suitable climes, or that were dependent for key parts of their food web on the species that had succumbed directly in response to the increased temperatures.

We also know that, even though the Great Dying began with a snap ice age, by its end, global temperatures had increased beyond the pre-ice-age average by approximately 10 degrees Centigrade. That was enough to completely melt the planet's ice caps, which led to a significant increase in global sea levels (by as much as 100 meters) and downright biblical floods, as a consequence.

Because CO2 persists in the atmosphere for 20,000 years or more under current conditions (and which will likely stick around still longer as the world's rain forests and wetland environments - which are critical CO2 sinks - continue to disappear), even once we, as a species, achieve zero net CO2 emissions (assuming, of course, that we ever actually do so), the climate-warming effects of the accumulated atmospheric load will continue to push global average temperatures upward for quite literally thousands of years to come.

And, given that the Arctic is already experiencing unprecedented methane emissions, both from deposits released by melting permafrost and from what does, in fact, appear to be melting clathrates at relatively shallow depths, the same kind of abrupt, massive atmospheric methane infusion that caused peak extinction in the P-T event may occur considerably sooner in the current one than climate models of even a few years ago predicted.

So, in broad terms, what is going to happen is well-known. The currently-unanswered questions are: how soon will it happen, and what will happen to our technological/industrial civilization as a result?

So, here's the good news, such as it is: although the climate - and the global ecology that depends on it - is going to radically change, and the e

guruevi stated position of the scientific community on the currently-unfolding global climate change as:

Our current model predicts a massive change, we don't know what that means or what will happen, but we probably have to do something

Mmm ... sort of.

The thing is, we do, in fact, know what that means, and what will happen, because it has happened before, at the end of the Permian Period, when a massive increase in greenhouse gas emissions created a cascade of events that eventually caused 70% of terrestrial species and as much as 96% of marine species to go extinct over a period of no more than 100,000 years.

What we don't know - because the increase in CO2 levels at the onset of the P-T extinction occured much, much more slowly than is the case in the current event - is how quickly what happened a quarter-billion years ago will happen in the current era. Back then, it may have taken as long as 20,000-50,000 years for CO2 to accumulate to sufficient levels to cause the ocean to warm up enough to melt the massive deposits of methane clathrates in its abyssal depths. That - along with the melting of arctic and antarctic permafrost - released an enormous quantity of methane into the atmosphere over a very short time. In turn, that sudden, massive, global methane release had two effects that were catastrophic for land species and downright apocalyptic for oceanic ones. First, the oceans abruptly became both acidic enough to dissolve the shells of bivalves, nautiluses, crustaceans, corals, and other exoskeletal creatures, and, at the same time, their upper layers also became highly anoxic to a sufficient depth to smother pretty much all the icthyoid and gelatinous ones. Secondly, temperatures on land soared to levels that killed off those species that were unable either to migrate to more suitable climes, or that were dependent for key parts of their food web on the species that had succumbed directly in response to the increased temperatures.

We also know that, even though the Great Dying began with a snap ice age, by its end, global temperatures had increased beyond the pre-ice-age average by approximately 10 degrees Centigrade. That was enough to completely melt the planet's ice caps, which led to a significant increase in global sea levels (by as much as 100 meters) and downright biblical floods, as a consequence.

Because CO2 persists in the atmosphere for 20,000 years or more under current conditions (and which will likely stick around still longer as the world's rain forests and wetland environments - which are critical CO2 sinks - continue to disappear), even once we, as a species, achieve zero net CO2 emissions (assuming, of course, that we ever actually do so), the climate-warming effects of the accumulated atmospheric load will continue to push global average temperatures upward for quite literally thousands of years to come.

And, given that the Arctic is already experiencing unprecedented methane emissions, both from deposits released by melting permafrost and from what does, in fact, appear to be melting clathrates at relatively shallow depths, the same kind of abrupt, massive atmospheric methane infusion that caused peak extinction in the P-T event may occur considerably sooner in the current one than climate models of even a few years ago predicted.

So, in broad terms, what is going to happen is well-known. The currently-unanswered questions are: how soon will it happen, and what will happen to our technological/industrial civilization as a result?

So, here's the good news, such as it is: although the climate - and the global ecology that depends on it - is going to radically change, and the e