Nothing wrong with sticking it in rubbing alcohol after using it. At least if it's one of the old mercury ones. They had a marker that floated on top of the mercury column and would stay in place when the thermometer cooled off. That's why you had to shake it down.
(I'm having a lot of trouble, though, imagining the story about goats that you heard.)
What you are describing cannot be done in this current world. Power and water, e.g., are subsidized by taxes that are not imposed on the use of power and water.
For that matter, neither power nor water systems would be possible without eminent domain.
OTOH, this does lead to catch-22 situations. I, e.g., am legally required to maintain the sidewalk in from of my house in a safe condition. OTOH, it's the property of the city, so I'm forbidden to maintain it.
I used to think of myself as a conservative, and grit my teeth at what others who called themselves conservatives were in favor of. However since the neo-cons have come around I've decided to abandon the term completely. Neo-cons are neo-cons (with the accent on "con"), and I guess I'm a libertarian, though certainly not a Libertarian.
I don't fit as an anarchist, or even, really, as a minarchist. I do believe that social services are a social necessity. But I'm definitely not a believer in massive central control. I'm much more in favor of individual's rights than of state's rights. Unfortunately, I'm unable to believe in any system that I've heard of for making it work.
Patrick Henry looked at the proposed US Constitution and said of it: "I smell a rat. It squints towards monarchy." He clearly had that right. There's no reasonable way for individuals to enforce their rights against larger organizations. There are many things that "almost work", but none of them quite do the job.
FWIW, I think that it might work if presidents, governors, and legislators were selected at random among those who cared to apply for the job. Nobody excluded except for not being able to pass a test that could be passed by 90% of graduating seniors from high school. And all governmental workers, including legislators and executives, were forbidden from accepting remuneration from anyone by the government from that point forwards. (N.B.: This means that a retiring legislator or executive would be required to be either a survivalist, or to live on his pension and previous earnings. I'd bet on rather large pensions. So set both the sitting legislator level and the pension level into the constitution at twice the median income.)
This would do away with all lobbyists. This would largely eliminate the selection of the ones most eager for the power of the office. Since legislators generally ignore the desires of the citizenry already, the loss of the ability to vote against them is not a significant problem. And since we don't know what they're going to be like until after they get into office, the loss of the ability to vote for them is no big problem.
Probably the terms of office should be indefinite subject to recall. And make recall petitions relatively easy to bring to a vote. 40% disapproval should be grounds for the selection of a new official.
Actually the only likely things that would bring the price of goal down would involve a population crash. To bring it down a lot would require a severe population crash.
There's one class of alternatives: If one of the approaches yielded energy combined with other technologies that made it cheap to extract gold from the sea, or from the mantel (HAH!), Or if mining asteroids became cheap, and some of them contained separated bodies of gold ore.
So holding onto a resource which has been almost totally mined out, and which can't reasonably be manufactured, is a reasonable strategy. But it's not one that many people could follow. I think one would need to be quite wealthy to even begin.
(OTOH, the analysis which indicted this gold-bug as a parasite is accurate. He's not counting the extent to which he uses various socially subsidized services, from those of the police to those of the airport. And clearly, even from his self description, many others. [And no, not even local governments support themselves solely on sales tax. Or at least in no place that I have heard of.])
That said, I, too, have severe qualms about fiat money. Personally I favor monocrystalline silicon. Large fault-free wafers. And the purity of the reserve is proven by it's continual recycling as input to a chip foundary. (OTOH, that's subject to technological obsolescence...so it's got problems too.)
That said, the real value of money is that the government will accept it as payment when they say you owe them a debt. And the real value of the money depends on how big a debt they claim you owe. When they claim a larger debt, the value of each monetary unit decreases.
Well, it depends on just how sensitive the conditions are. They might need Forward mass neutralizers if they really need free-fall conditions (and aren't willing to go into a distant solar orbit). And those things would be HEAVY. And putting heavy things in orbit isn't cheap. And they also require fancy machining to ensure that each weight is precisely spherical and exactly the same weight.
It's not just a browser, it's a browser + Slashdot. Never any other site.
And never when I'm not on the web, compiling, editing, etc. So I don't think it's RAM. I suppose there might be some communications thing that Slashdot exercises, and other things don't, but RAM doesn't sound reasonable.
The GPG check can also fail if they just get you to add their private key into you list of trusted keys. This is a point that has occasionally bothered me. There doesn't seem to be any decent way to authenticate that the key you're being asked to add is one that should be trusted. Web of trust was a decent approach, but it didn't scale. It demanded personal meetings and the new person being vouched for by the old one. When it got expanded onto the web, the process got broken.
Someone needs to start thinking seriously about this. Someone with decent knowledge of security, and a knowledge of FOSS procedures. And someone friendly to FOSS. And with decent political connections within the community.
Who's been claiming that things like this couldn't happen?
This is the reason that both deb's and rpm's went to signing all packages, and the reason that best practice requires that signatures not be hosted on the same server as the binaries. (OTOH, I've got to admit that these "best practices" aren't always followed. And I'm currently trusting a package from one site that doesn't sign it's debs with a signature I'm willing to trust. But if I were conscientious I wouldn't use that package.)
So, yeah, this is the kind of thing that "best practices" are intended to prevent, and we don't always follow the best practices, because they are less convenient. But if we care, we can tell whether best practices are being followed.
Now tarballs are a different kind of beast. Perhaps Slackware has some way to deal with the problem of tarball authentication that I don't know of. But lacking that I always feel that using a tarball is taking a risk. And that one should have one's eyes open to that problem. With a tarball you don't know who you're trusting. If you use hashcode verification stored on the same server as the tarball, then the hashcode doesn't prove anything. (For that reason Python always posts both the MD5 and the pgp key on their website [A separate server from their download server]. This is, at least close to, best practices for tarballs.)
FWIW, I've run into problems trying to file bug reports. It's generally been harder to file the reports than to deal with the problem.
Now in this particular case the complaining party apparently could identify the bug down to "which package is causing the problem", but I usually can't. My system will have been working fine, until suddenly it isn't. Then the system asks me to file a bug report on some package, and I've no idea why the system suddenly failed. I wasn't, as far as I knew, doing anything unusual. I suspect some background process, but probably one I don't even know the name of. And the first question I'm supposed to answer is "What package caused the problem?"
Onwards to another class of problems. This one I can clearly identify the culprit: The interaction between FireFox and Slashdot. Occasionally the new Slashdot code will get locked into a loop that totally locks up my system. The mouse pointer will still move, but there's no response to clicks, and the keyboard won't even respond to the caps lock key. (I.e., the status light won't change.) I've occasionally waited for half an hour, and the problem doesn't time out or resolve. The only answer I've found is to force a reboot. I can't even switch to another terminal and kill the process. When I reboot there are two orphaned blocks on the/home partition, but everything is back to normal.
But if there's any place to report this, I sure can't find it.
I've heard that assertion before, but I've never seen any evidence to back it up. (Well, not strictly true. Back around 1998 I think I did see some evidence, but I couldn't check it's honesty.)
If I were to assert that all proprietary software were an incredible garbage pit of sloppy hacks and unchecked array references you couldn't prove me wrong. But there's good evidence that that describes much proprietary software. (And I left out copyright infringement.)
Now I think my proposed assertion is wrong, but not as wrong as your assertion . OTOH, neither of us can prove it using any commonly accepted standard of proof.
I wish it would work that way. Sigh. But accountants evaluating the value of a property aren't really guided by what lawyers say it's worth. (For that matter, the lawyers didn't really say it was worth that much.)
What this is really about is how absurdly inappropriate, unreasonable, and unjust copyright laws are.
No. Only if it's a natural monopoly should it be regulated. Otherwise it should be carved in to several, probably more than five, pieces, and let the pieces compete. Stockholders should be allowed to choose which of the pieces they choose to be invested in.
And *IF* it's a natural monopoly, it should still be investigated for carving up into chunks. If parts of it are not natural monopolies, then they should be carved off, and made into separate companies.
N.B.: It's essential that after the dismemberment, no single entity should be a director of more than one of the companies. (I didn't say person, because some directors are representatives of other corporations. In such a case I'm saying that that corporation can only have a representative on the board of one of the companies.)
1) You're assuming that terrorist has a useful definition. As far as I can tell, that's an incorrect assumption.
2) Catching a terrorist doesn't prove that the system is effective. The easiest way to do that is just catch everybody. You need to know both the percentage of false positives AND the percentage of false negatives. And you can't.
3) I don't think your fraction is small enough. If they identified the 0.1% most likely to be terrorists, the number of false positives would be so large as to drown any utility. You'd probably need to get it down to something like 0.001%, and THAT might not be small enough. The percentage of actual terrorists (using a reasonable definition of the term) is so small as to be nearly invisible. One in a million is probably overstating the case.
P.S.: That's why your example of Texas concealed permit carriers not going through inspection is workable. It's not that concealed permit carriers are so reliable, it's that terrorists are quite uncommon. Decrease the frequency by insisting that they also be concealed permit carriers and you probably won't find any. This isn't screening out terrorists, it's screening out *people*, and extremely small fraction of whom are terrorists (by any reasonable definition).
N.B.: Terrorist has **LOTS** of unreasonable definitions. I've actually heard someone (not a govt. official) defend using it to describe someone who was playing a loud boombox.
Fine with me, as long as the temperature is reasonable. I'm not a nudist, but I have no objection to playing the part for awhile. (Others, the one's looking at me, might object, but that's their problem.)
OTOH, this does create cleanliness problems in the public seating areas.
That said, some religions do require parts of the body to be covered. E.g., orthodox Jewish males must wear a yarmulke in public, though it's often covered. Also some Wiccan groups and, I believe, some Masonic groups also require that certain body parts be kept covered. ("Thou shalt always conceal, never reveal, any art or arts, part or parts...") So the basic assertion is wrong.
It's worse than that. You don't have ANY way to measure their effectiveness. At least no way that doesn't depend on the definitions that they create and the measurement tools that they use. This allows them to define terrorists as "the people we caught", (not that I'm claiming that they did, just that they could), and that's a truly worthless measure.
To have an idea of how effective they are one would need to know how many terrorists exist to be caught. If there aren't any, then not catching any doesn't prove that they are ineffective, or even that they're useless...they might, by their existence, have discouraged terrorists from existing.
OK, that's another silly case. But the point is that their justification is based around things that can't be measured. And it's my suspicion that the purpose of the security theater is to convince people that they are threatened by an external enemy, so that they'll ignore the internal enemy...the one who is orchestrating the theater.
OTOH, to fairly judge the program we'd need to have some way of figuring how many terrorist actions it discouraged. My guess would be zero, but I sure couldn't prove it.
So I prefer not to argue on the basis that it's ineffective. It probably is, but the probability is only up around 95% or so. Not enough to discourage someone who's a believer.
It's much better to claim there's no evidence that it works. Maybe they'll be able to come up with something, but I haven't heard anything yet.
Things that can be used as explosives often have many other uses. From the information that has been presented, I think you are jumping to conclusions.
The story I would have built around it would have to do with making illegal fireworks. It's still a fabrication, but I think the probability is higher.
Well, he may have something effective, but it's definitely not science. He just said so.
OTOH, just because a trade secret isn't science doesn't mean it isn't effective. It means you can't tell without judging by results. Problem is, in this case we don't have any valid way to judge the results. (I.e., he may have a notable failure, but we have no way of judging either is % of false positives, OR his % of false negatives.)
Don't consider it a "European thing", as i think I could find something similar about the US within the last couple of months and restricting myself to Slashdot.
OTOH, if you wanted to call it an "Authoritarian thing" I'd be hard pressed to deny it.
P.S.: Unlike in traditional usage, "authoritarian" doesn't distinguish between left wing and right wing. Modern left-wingers can be just as authoritarian as their right-wing opponents. WWII pretty much saw the end of that particular association...though the 1960's featured a moderate revival.
P.P.S.: I have a strong suspicion that the association of authoritarianism with either left or right wing, and by implication it's opposite with the opponents of such, is pretty much an artifact of historical perspective. Groups not in power tend to oppose the centralization of power. Groups currently holding it then to support it. Left or right wing, or even anarchist, probably doesn't make any difference, though it may well make a difference in the means used to centralize the power.
Largely a different group of people. When you homogenize your idea of the audience, you loose crucial perspective.
FWIW, I use neither Apple nor Flash, and will happily bash either, as appropriate. I consider Flash trashy and a security risk, and Apple has an intolerable EULA, despite the nice hardware.
If it uses DNA or RNA (quite unlikely) then I guess that contamination is possible. But since we'd want to totally sequence whatever replicator molecule it used, it would be reasonably easy to determine whether contamination is even a reasonable hypothesis.
Remember, all life on this planet is related to a measurable degree. If it's related, then we can figure out what it's most closely related to, and how long ago it diverged. (Remember, when the proto-moon collided with the earth it quite likely emitted fragments that went that far. But we could measure even that distant a relationship, albeit with less certainty.)
But it's most likely that whatever molecule it uses for a replicator would be something not related to our nucleic acids. For one thing, the major solvents appear to be non-polar rather than polar, so anything water-based would be insoluble, where things that are lipid based would tend to be soluble. Also, the reaction rate is very temperature dependent, so it would be probable that the major chemicals of life on Titan would be unstable at STP (standard temperature and pressure).
Usually, yes, but it's my impression that in this particular case they mean "Within a few centuries or so. And tomorrow wouldn't be really surprising."
This doesn't mean it's anything to be concerned about, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing wrong with sticking it in rubbing alcohol after using it. At least if it's one of the old mercury ones. They had a marker that floated on top of the mercury column and would stay in place when the thermometer cooled off. That's why you had to shake it down.
(I'm having a lot of trouble, though, imagining the story about goats that you heard.)
What you are describing cannot be done in this current world. Power and water, e.g., are subsidized by taxes that are not imposed on the use of power and water.
For that matter, neither power nor water systems would be possible without eminent domain.
OTOH, this does lead to catch-22 situations. I, e.g., am legally required to maintain the sidewalk in from of my house in a safe condition. OTOH, it's the property of the city, so I'm forbidden to maintain it.
I used to think of myself as a conservative, and grit my teeth at what others who called themselves conservatives were in favor of. However since the neo-cons have come around I've decided to abandon the term completely. Neo-cons are neo-cons (with the accent on "con"), and I guess I'm a libertarian, though certainly not a Libertarian.
I don't fit as an anarchist, or even, really, as a minarchist. I do believe that social services are a social necessity. But I'm definitely not a believer in massive central control. I'm much more in favor of individual's rights than of state's rights. Unfortunately, I'm unable to believe in any system that I've heard of for making it work.
Patrick Henry looked at the proposed US Constitution and said of it: "I smell a rat. It squints towards monarchy." He clearly had that right. There's no reasonable way for individuals to enforce their rights against larger organizations. There are many things that "almost work", but none of them quite do the job.
FWIW, I think that it might work if presidents, governors, and legislators were selected at random among those who cared to apply for the job. Nobody excluded except for not being able to pass a test that could be passed by 90% of graduating seniors from high school. And all governmental workers, including legislators and executives, were forbidden from accepting remuneration from anyone by the government from that point forwards. (N.B.: This means that a retiring legislator or executive would be required to be either a survivalist, or to live on his pension and previous earnings. I'd bet on rather large pensions. So set both the sitting legislator level and the pension level into the constitution at twice the median income.)
This would do away with all lobbyists. This would largely eliminate the selection of the ones most eager for the power of the office. Since legislators generally ignore the desires of the citizenry already, the loss of the ability to vote against them is not a significant problem. And since we don't know what they're going to be like until after they get into office, the loss of the ability to vote for them is no big problem.
Probably the terms of office should be indefinite subject to recall. And make recall petitions relatively easy to bring to a vote. 40% disapproval should be grounds for the selection of a new official.
Might work.
Actually the only likely things that would bring the price of goal down would involve a population crash. To bring it down a lot would require a severe population crash.
There's one class of alternatives: If one of the approaches yielded energy combined with other technologies that made it cheap to extract gold from the sea, or from the mantel (HAH!), Or if mining asteroids became cheap, and some of them contained separated bodies of gold ore.
So holding onto a resource which has been almost totally mined out, and which can't reasonably be manufactured, is a reasonable strategy. But it's not one that many people could follow. I think one would need to be quite wealthy to even begin.
(OTOH, the analysis which indicted this gold-bug as a parasite is accurate. He's not counting the extent to which he uses various socially subsidized services, from those of the police to those of the airport. And clearly, even from his self description, many others. [And no, not even local governments support themselves solely on sales tax. Or at least in no place that I have heard of.])
That said, I, too, have severe qualms about fiat money. Personally I favor monocrystalline silicon. Large fault-free wafers. And the purity of the reserve is proven by it's continual recycling as input to a chip foundary. (OTOH, that's subject to technological obsolescence...so it's got problems too.)
That said, the real value of money is that the government will accept it as payment when they say you owe them a debt. And the real value of the money depends on how big a debt they claim you owe. When they claim a larger debt, the value of each monetary unit decreases.
Well, it depends on just how sensitive the conditions are. They might need Forward mass neutralizers if they really need free-fall conditions (and aren't willing to go into a distant solar orbit). And those things would be HEAVY. And putting heavy things in orbit isn't cheap. And they also require fancy machining to ensure that each weight is precisely spherical and exactly the same weight.
Still, it's do-able, with enough effort.
It's not just a browser, it's a browser + Slashdot. Never any other site.
And never when I'm not on the web, compiling, editing, etc. So I don't think it's RAM. I suppose there might be some communications thing that Slashdot exercises, and other things don't, but RAM doesn't sound reasonable.
The GPG check can also fail if they just get you to add their private key into you list of trusted keys. This is a point that has occasionally bothered me. There doesn't seem to be any decent way to authenticate that the key you're being asked to add is one that should be trusted. Web of trust was a decent approach, but it didn't scale. It demanded personal meetings and the new person being vouched for by the old one. When it got expanded onto the web, the process got broken.
Someone needs to start thinking seriously about this. Someone with decent knowledge of security, and a knowledge of FOSS procedures. And someone friendly to FOSS. And with decent political connections within the community.
Who's been claiming that things like this couldn't happen?
This is the reason that both deb's and rpm's went to signing all packages, and the reason that best practice requires that signatures not be hosted on the same server as the binaries. (OTOH, I've got to admit that these "best practices" aren't always followed. And I'm currently trusting a package from one site that doesn't sign it's debs with a signature I'm willing to trust. But if I were conscientious I wouldn't use that package.)
So, yeah, this is the kind of thing that "best practices" are intended to prevent, and we don't always follow the best practices, because they are less convenient. But if we care, we can tell whether best practices are being followed.
Now tarballs are a different kind of beast. Perhaps Slackware has some way to deal with the problem of tarball authentication that I don't know of. But lacking that I always feel that using a tarball is taking a risk. And that one should have one's eyes open to that problem. With a tarball you don't know who you're trusting. If you use hashcode verification stored on the same server as the tarball, then the hashcode doesn't prove anything. (For that reason Python always posts both the MD5 and the pgp key on their website [A separate server from their download server]. This is, at least close to, best practices for tarballs.)
FWIW, I've run into problems trying to file bug reports. It's generally been harder to file the reports than to deal with the problem.
Now in this particular case the complaining party apparently could identify the bug down to "which package is causing the problem", but I usually can't. My system will have been working fine, until suddenly it isn't. Then the system asks me to file a bug report on some package, and I've no idea why the system suddenly failed. I wasn't, as far as I knew, doing anything unusual. I suspect some background process, but probably one I don't even know the name of. And the first question I'm supposed to answer is "What package caused the problem?"
Onwards to another class of problems. This one I can clearly identify the culprit: The interaction between FireFox and Slashdot. Occasionally the new Slashdot code will get locked into a loop that totally locks up my system. The mouse pointer will still move, but there's no response to clicks, and the keyboard won't even respond to the caps lock key. (I.e., the status light won't change.) I've occasionally waited for half an hour, and the problem doesn't time out or resolve. The only answer I've found is to force a reboot. I can't even switch to another terminal and kill the process. When I reboot there are two orphaned blocks on the /home partition, but everything is back to normal.
But if there's any place to report this, I sure can't find it.
I've heard that assertion before, but I've never seen any evidence to back it up. (Well, not strictly true. Back around 1998 I think I did see some evidence, but I couldn't check it's honesty.)
If I were to assert that all proprietary software were an incredible garbage pit of sloppy hacks and unchecked array references you couldn't prove me wrong. But there's good evidence that that describes much proprietary software. (And I left out copyright infringement.)
Now I think my proposed assertion is wrong, but not as wrong as your assertion . OTOH, neither of us can prove it using any commonly accepted standard of proof.
Yes, and humans were violent on a small-scale long before agriculture. But it was on a small scale. Scale makes a big difference.
If it's in the middle of an oil spill, it's dead anyway. Even things on the edge that only get slightly slimed and are carefully treated often die.
I wish it would work that way. Sigh. But accountants evaluating the value of a property aren't really guided by what lawyers say it's worth. (For that matter, the lawyers didn't really say it was worth that much.)
What this is really about is how absurdly inappropriate, unreasonable, and unjust copyright laws are.
No. Only if it's a natural monopoly should it be regulated. Otherwise it should be carved in to several, probably more than five, pieces, and let the pieces compete. Stockholders should be allowed to choose which of the pieces they choose to be invested in.
And *IF* it's a natural monopoly, it should still be investigated for carving up into chunks. If parts of it are not natural monopolies, then they should be carved off, and made into separate companies.
N.B.: It's essential that after the dismemberment, no single entity should be a director of more than one of the companies. (I didn't say person, because some directors are representatives of other corporations. In such a case I'm saying that that corporation can only have a representative on the board of one of the companies.)
1) You're assuming that terrorist has a useful definition. As far as I can tell, that's an incorrect assumption.
2) Catching a terrorist doesn't prove that the system is effective. The easiest way to do that is just catch everybody. You need to know both the percentage of false positives AND the percentage of false negatives. And you can't.
3) I don't think your fraction is small enough. If they identified the 0.1% most likely to be terrorists, the number of false positives would be so large as to drown any utility. You'd probably need to get it down to something like 0.001%, and THAT might not be small enough. The percentage of actual terrorists (using a reasonable definition of the term) is so small as to be nearly invisible. One in a million is probably overstating the case.
P.S.: That's why your example of Texas concealed permit carriers not going through inspection is workable. It's not that concealed permit carriers are so reliable, it's that terrorists are quite uncommon. Decrease the frequency by insisting that they also be concealed permit carriers and you probably won't find any. This isn't screening out terrorists, it's screening out *people*, and extremely small fraction of whom are terrorists (by any reasonable definition).
N.B.: Terrorist has **LOTS** of unreasonable definitions. I've actually heard someone (not a govt. official) defend using it to describe someone who was playing a loud boombox.
Fine with me, as long as the temperature is reasonable. I'm not a nudist, but I have no objection to playing the part for awhile. (Others, the one's looking at me, might object, but that's their problem.)
OTOH, this does create cleanliness problems in the public seating areas.
That said, some religions do require parts of the body to be covered. E.g., orthodox Jewish males must wear a yarmulke in public, though it's often covered. Also some Wiccan groups and, I believe, some Masonic groups also require that certain body parts be kept covered. ("Thou shalt always conceal, never reveal, any art or arts, part or parts ...") So the basic assertion is wrong.
It's worse than that. You don't have ANY way to measure their effectiveness. At least no way that doesn't depend on the definitions that they create and the measurement tools that they use. This allows them to define terrorists as "the people we caught", (not that I'm claiming that they did, just that they could), and that's a truly worthless measure.
To have an idea of how effective they are one would need to know how many terrorists exist to be caught. If there aren't any, then not catching any doesn't prove that they are ineffective, or even that they're useless...they might, by their existence, have discouraged terrorists from existing.
OK, that's another silly case. But the point is that their justification is based around things that can't be measured. And it's my suspicion that the purpose of the security theater is to convince people that they are threatened by an external enemy, so that they'll ignore the internal enemy...the one who is orchestrating the theater.
OTOH, to fairly judge the program we'd need to have some way of figuring how many terrorist actions it discouraged. My guess would be zero, but I sure couldn't prove it.
So I prefer not to argue on the basis that it's ineffective. It probably is, but the probability is only up around 95% or so. Not enough to discourage someone who's a believer.
It's much better to claim there's no evidence that it works. Maybe they'll be able to come up with something, but I haven't heard anything yet.
Things that can be used as explosives often have many other uses. From the information that has been presented, I think you are jumping to conclusions.
The story I would have built around it would have to do with making illegal fireworks. It's still a fabrication, but I think the probability is higher.
Well, he may have something effective, but it's definitely not science. He just said so.
OTOH, just because a trade secret isn't science doesn't mean it isn't effective. It means you can't tell without judging by results. Problem is, in this case we don't have any valid way to judge the results. (I.e., he may have a notable failure, but we have no way of judging either is % of false positives, OR his % of false negatives.)
Don't consider it a "European thing", as i think I could find something similar about the US within the last couple of months and restricting myself to Slashdot.
OTOH, if you wanted to call it an "Authoritarian thing" I'd be hard pressed to deny it.
P.S.: Unlike in traditional usage, "authoritarian" doesn't distinguish between left wing and right wing. Modern left-wingers can be just as authoritarian as their right-wing opponents. WWII pretty much saw the end of that particular association...though the 1960's featured a moderate revival.
P.P.S.: I have a strong suspicion that the association of authoritarianism with either left or right wing, and by implication it's opposite with the opponents of such, is pretty much an artifact of historical perspective. Groups not in power tend to oppose the centralization of power. Groups currently holding it then to support it. Left or right wing, or even anarchist, probably doesn't make any difference, though it may well make a difference in the means used to centralize the power.
There actually are plenty of lawyers that have trouble making the rent. They just aren't the ones you hear about.
Largely a different group of people. When you homogenize your idea of the audience, you loose crucial perspective.
FWIW, I use neither Apple nor Flash, and will happily bash either, as appropriate. I consider Flash trashy and a security risk, and Apple has an intolerable EULA, despite the nice hardware.
If it uses DNA or RNA (quite unlikely) then I guess that contamination is possible. But since we'd want to totally sequence whatever replicator molecule it used, it would be reasonably easy to determine whether contamination is even a reasonable hypothesis.
Remember, all life on this planet is related to a measurable degree. If it's related, then we can figure out what it's most closely related to, and how long ago it diverged. (Remember, when the proto-moon collided with the earth it quite likely emitted fragments that went that far. But we could measure even that distant a relationship, albeit with less certainty.)
But it's most likely that whatever molecule it uses for a replicator would be something not related to our nucleic acids. For one thing, the major solvents appear to be non-polar rather than polar, so anything water-based would be insoluble, where things that are lipid based would tend to be soluble. Also, the reaction rate is very temperature dependent, so it would be probable that the major chemicals of life on Titan would be unstable at STP (standard temperature and pressure).
Usually, yes, but it's my impression that in this particular case they mean "Within a few centuries or so. And tomorrow wouldn't be really surprising."
This doesn't mean it's anything to be concerned about, though.