The lovely thing about mercury is that it's slow. The attacker stands an excellent chance of being off the plane and gone before it falls apart in the air on a later flight.
While I'm only one person, flying only once per year to america, I wonder how many others did the same.
Add me to the list. I used to rack up about 50,000 frequent flyer miles a year for conferences and business in general. In the last six years I've flown a total of twice, and if I have to do it again I'll drive or (maybe) take a train. SF is only a long day's drive from Phoenix anyway and I have family at about halfway.
Actually, by itself it's a powder mix. It's convenient to add a liquid binder to make a paste for easy application but it can also be pressed with any of several other binders into any number of solid forms. Plaques, for instance, to be awarded at a conference. Carry on 20 kg of award plaques and Security might ask to see them but they won't blink at you carrying them on. The rest is obvious to any sophomore engineering student.
And TSA knows about these [1], but since there's no practical way to screen for them they just hope that the Bad Guys are too stupid to bother with a sure-fire way to remove planes from the sky.
[1] And many, many others. Ask a sophomore engineering class to come up with methods and you can have hundreds. Fortunately, Bad Guys are never geeks.
The thesis there is that current lifespans are shortened by bad diet, not that starvation was not a factor in the distant past. If I were reubtting that, I'd be pointing to archaeological evidence that until the advent of agriculture starvation was not a dominant factor in mortality. As it is, disease and accident for our distant hunter/gatherer ancestors were sufficient to account for most mortality.
The short lifetimes of our distant ancestors mostly came from accident and infectious disease -- and up until 60 or so, your odds against both actually improve the older you get. Maybe fewer of them made it to those ages, but once they got out of childhood a fair number did. After that, their teeth were more likely to give out before their hearts did or before cancer got them (etc.)
As for the aging effects of modern lifestyles, I think if you research it you'll find that a reasonably active modern American is much more likely to be in good health than our ancestors were. There was a study published a couple of years ago (IIRC) that did a statistical workup of the average American of 150 years ago, and it wasn't a happy one. No question they were tough, because they had to be to make it through the week with their bodies in the shape they were: poorly-healed fractures and joint injuries, rheumatic heart disease, tuberculosis, endocarditis, rotten teeth, you name it.
What these studies indicate is that is not the case with illness. It is actually better to get sick at an early age than not to.
s/sick/exposed to some bacteria/ There's a big difference between being exposed to common bacteria of the soil and animal digestive tracts and coming down with smallpox, meningitis, etc. From the articles I've read, the protective effect is seen with completely harmless bacteria, so there's no reason to claim benefits from exposure to pathogens. Especially when you consider that infant diarrhea accounted for the majority of that 50% infant mortality.
With some exceptions. If your lifetime chances of avoiding a pathogen are slim, it may be better to be esposed in infancy while getting lots of maternal antibodies with every meal, assuming that Mama also gets exposed often enough to maintain a high antibody titre. That process is why polio was less of a threat in the 17th century, where the stuff was in the water supply all over the world, than in the 20th where we were actually doing things that blocked routine fecal-oral transmission.
All in all, with pathogens I prefer vaccination where possible.
Main difference in modern life is that most of us live long enough to see our grand-children and usually our great-grand children - human like creatures 10,000+ years ago probably didn't.
Ten thousand years ago, our ancestors were very much like us today. You'd have a hard time telling us apart assuming similar childhood environments.
As for grandchildren -- it doesn't take a long lifespan when girls are mothers at 15. And bear in mind that humans evolved menopause. It didn't just happen, it's a complex process that has evolutionary costs and so must have significant evolutionary benefits. Which means that our very distant ancestors must have lived until their 50s often enough to make a difference. Hunter/gatherers today (and a hundred years ago) do, so it's hardly surprising.
What made (past tense) you stronger is the stuff that killed half of each generation of your ancestors' competition.
What doesn't kill you delays the inevitable, but if it doesn't keep you from reproducing it improves the quality of your children's mates and thus makes your grandchildren stronger.
The study supports the 'hygiene hypothesis,' which contends that such auto-immune diseases are more common in the developed world where the prevalence of antibiotics and antibacterials reduce children's exposure to microbes."
Not to mention soap, bleach, clean water for washing, floor coverings, indoor heating and cooling, etc.
In the 11th century, Maimonides wrote about asthma -- in the children of the nobility of Spain, where they actually washed and generally kept house before the Christians reconquered the Iberian Peninsula and made handwashing (etc.) cause for you to be hauled off by the Inquisition. The children of the poor, on the other hand, had dirt floors and crawled around in the dirt with dogs, chickens, goats, etc.
About time. The processes used to remove the unwanted chamicals from my coffee (caffeine, in particular) from my coffee so y'all can have the straight drug are nasty and degrade the fine flavor. Since caffeine does absolutely bupkis for me (aside from headaches when I go off of it) I don't see any point in consuming something that does no good and might, maybe, raise my blood pressure and screw with my sleep patterns. Waking up ready to go at 0300 is fine; I don't see any point in getting any less sleep.
So y'all enjoy the extract while I'm still sending it to you, because when they finally get some decent Sumatran with no caffeine to begin with I'll be roasting up a pot of heaven every day.
I am sooooo looking forward to my new house with the "potting" room where I can have grow lamps. Getting no-knock raids in the middle of the night where the narcs find absolutely bupkis is funny enough, but it can't be that hard to come up with extracts that drive drug-sniffing dogs wild. Just a squirt here and there around the neighborhood...
As I recall, the first three books of the original series were first serialized in Analog magazine before they were published as novels.
They were. I read them in the original copies of Astounding. I "wasted" many hours when I probably should have been studying going through the University of Arizona's special collections department's copies dating from the first copy edited by John Campbell until my own collection picked up in the mid-50s.
I don't know where those copies are now, but I'm sure they aren't about to let undergraduates handle them.
Destroying evidence is obstruction of justice. That's illegal. Why haven't these police officers been arrested?
Dude, these are the police in the United States. Plenty of cases where we have police literally beating an unarmed, on the ground, man to death -- and on video -- and the killers aren't even charged. In the very rare instances when they have been charged, the juries let them off (which may explain why they're not charged.) In cases where a cop actually got fired, odds are very good that he'll be reinstated after his union or the other cops bring pressure to bear.
Don't forget: if a prosecutor is proven to actually fabricate evidence and destroy open-and-shut proof that you were innocent, he's totally immune from prosecution himself. Even if you're executed as a result of his malfeasance.
Their land-line business is regulated at set rates of return on investment. Sell off the capital base and they'll be required to reduce their land-line rates proportionately.
Or at any rate, that's the theory. Actual results depend on public rate commissions. Wise citizens pay careful attention to them, and this is an election year.
Regulated monopolies are generally allowed a fixed return on investment. For instance, all of that copper laid down in the twenties though the seventies is listed as an asset that the telcos get a few percent profit on each year. And that includes those buildings.
That means that AT&T will make a windfall of billions, but will also reduce their capitalization (and thus profits) going forward. They'd best invest wisely.
Slashdot Mirror
Further deponent sayeth naught.
The lovely thing about mercury is that it's slow. The attacker stands an excellent chance of being off the plane and gone before it falls apart in the air on a later flight.
While I'm only one person, flying only once per year to america, I wonder how many others did the same.
Add me to the list. I used to rack up about 50,000 frequent flyer miles a year for conferences and business in general. In the last six years I've flown a total of twice, and if I have to do it again I'll drive or (maybe) take a train. SF is only a long day's drive from Phoenix anyway and I have family at about halfway.
With retirement coming up I may never fly again.
Your sarcasmometer is overdue for calibration.
Thermite makes a wonderful toothpaste...
Actually, by itself it's a powder mix. It's convenient to add a liquid binder to make a paste for easy application but it can also be pressed with any of several other binders into any number of solid forms. Plaques, for instance, to be awarded at a conference. Carry on 20 kg of award plaques and Security might ask to see them but they won't blink at you carrying them on. The rest is obvious to any sophomore engineering student.
And TSA knows about these [1], but since there's no practical way to screen for them they just hope that the Bad Guys are too stupid to bother with a sure-fire way to remove planes from the sky.
[1] And many, many others. Ask a sophomore engineering class to come up with methods and you can have hundreds. Fortunately, Bad Guys are never geeks.
There's no limit to the amoung of thermite you can carry on, and no limit to the amount of calcium carbide.
Just to name two.
spies are ecstatic over the goodies that Uncle Sugar is about to drop in their laps.
The thesis there is that current lifespans are shortened by bad diet, not that starvation was not a factor in the distant past. If I were reubtting that, I'd be pointing to archaeological evidence that until the advent of agriculture starvation was not a dominant factor in mortality. As it is, disease and accident for our distant hunter/gatherer ancestors were sufficient to account for most mortality.
The short lifetimes of our distant ancestors mostly came from accident and infectious disease -- and up until 60 or so, your odds against both actually improve the older you get. Maybe fewer of them made it to those ages, but once they got out of childhood a fair number did. After that, their teeth were more likely to give out before their hearts did or before cancer got them (etc.)
As for the aging effects of modern lifestyles, I think if you research it you'll find that a reasonably active modern American is much more likely to be in good health than our ancestors were. There was a study published a couple of years ago (IIRC) that did a statistical workup of the average American of 150 years ago, and it wasn't a happy one. No question they were tough, because they had to be to make it through the week with their bodies in the shape they were: poorly-healed fractures and joint injuries, rheumatic heart disease, tuberculosis, endocarditis, rotten teeth, you name it.
What these studies indicate is that is not the case with illness. It is actually better to get sick at an early age than not to.
s/sick/exposed to some bacteria/ There's a big difference between being exposed to common bacteria of the soil and animal digestive tracts and coming down with smallpox, meningitis, etc. From the articles I've read, the protective effect is seen with completely harmless bacteria, so there's no reason to claim benefits from exposure to pathogens. Especially when you consider that infant diarrhea accounted for the majority of that 50% infant mortality.
With some exceptions. If your lifetime chances of avoiding a pathogen are slim, it may be better to be esposed in infancy while getting lots of maternal antibodies with every meal, assuming that Mama also gets exposed often enough to maintain a high antibody titre. That process is why polio was less of a threat in the 17th century, where the stuff was in the water supply all over the world, than in the 20th where we were actually doing things that blocked routine fecal-oral transmission.
All in all, with pathogens I prefer vaccination where possible.
Main difference in modern life is that most of us live long enough to see our grand-children and usually our great-grand children - human like creatures 10,000+ years ago probably didn't.
Ten thousand years ago, our ancestors were very much like us today. You'd have a hard time telling us apart assuming similar childhood environments.
As for grandchildren -- it doesn't take a long lifespan when girls are mothers at 15. And bear in mind that humans evolved menopause. It didn't just happen, it's a complex process that has evolutionary costs and so must have significant evolutionary benefits. Which means that our very distant ancestors must have lived until their 50s often enough to make a difference. Hunter/gatherers today (and a hundred years ago) do, so it's hardly surprising.
What made (past tense) you stronger is the stuff that killed half of each generation of your ancestors' competition.
What doesn't kill you delays the inevitable, but if it doesn't keep you from reproducing it improves the quality of your children's mates and thus makes your grandchildren stronger.
The study supports the 'hygiene hypothesis,' which contends that such auto-immune diseases are more common in the developed world where the prevalence of antibiotics and antibacterials reduce children's exposure to microbes."
Not to mention soap, bleach, clean water for washing, floor coverings, indoor heating and cooling, etc.
In the 11th century, Maimonides wrote about asthma -- in the children of the nobility of Spain, where they actually washed and generally kept house before the Christians reconquered the Iberian Peninsula and made handwashing (etc.) cause for you to be hauled off by the Inquisition. The children of the poor, on the other hand, had dirt floors and crawled around in the dirt with dogs, chickens, goats, etc.
So much for blood donations.
Dang, those gnomes get around.
about the zombie apocalypse. And you laughted! Laughed, I say! Ha!!
You'll see! <laugh="evil">
I've been drinking coffee for 50 years. No grandchildren yet, and I intend to be around to watch them grow up.
Yeah, yeah -- not a reason most people on /. can identify with.
About time. The processes used to remove the unwanted chamicals from my coffee (caffeine, in particular) from my coffee so y'all can have the straight drug are nasty and degrade the fine flavor. Since caffeine does absolutely bupkis for me (aside from headaches when I go off of it) I don't see any point in consuming something that does no good and might, maybe, raise my blood pressure and screw with my sleep patterns. Waking up ready to go at 0300 is fine; I don't see any point in getting any less sleep.
So y'all enjoy the extract while I'm still sending it to you, because when they finally get some decent Sumatran with no caffeine to begin with I'll be roasting up a pot of heaven every day.
In all seriousness, though, they might just plant a baggy on your property. Good luck.
That's why I'd be doing my tomcat imitation and spraying the neighborhood. Including the Mayor's house.
I am sooooo looking forward to my new house with the "potting" room where I can have grow lamps. Getting no-knock raids in the middle of the night where the narcs find absolutely bupkis is funny enough, but it can't be that hard to come up with extracts that drive drug-sniffing dogs wild. Just a squirt here and there around the neighborhood ...
As I recall, the first three books of the original series were first serialized in Analog magazine before they were published as novels.
They were. I read them in the original copies of Astounding. I "wasted" many hours when I probably should have been studying going through the University of Arizona's special collections department's copies dating from the first copy edited by John Campbell until my own collection picked up in the mid-50s.
I don't know where those copies are now, but I'm sure they aren't about to let undergraduates handle them.
This could change my mind.
Destroying evidence is obstruction of justice. That's illegal. Why haven't these police officers been arrested?
Dude, these are the police in the United States. Plenty of cases where we have police literally beating an unarmed, on the ground, man to death -- and on video -- and the killers aren't even charged. In the very rare instances when they have been charged, the juries let them off (which may explain why they're not charged.) In cases where a cop actually got fired, odds are very good that he'll be reinstated after his union or the other cops bring pressure to bear.
Don't forget: if a prosecutor is proven to actually fabricate evidence and destroy open-and-shut proof that you were innocent, he's totally immune from prosecution himself. Even if you're executed as a result of his malfeasance.
Their land-line business is regulated at set rates of return on investment. Sell off the capital base and they'll be required to reduce their land-line rates proportionately.
Or at any rate, that's the theory. Actual results depend on public rate commissions. Wise citizens pay careful attention to them, and this is an election year.
Regulated monopolies are generally allowed a fixed return on investment. For instance, all of that copper laid down in the twenties though the seventies is listed as an asset that the telcos get a few percent profit on each year. And that includes those buildings.
That means that AT&T will make a windfall of billions, but will also reduce their capitalization (and thus profits) going forward. They'd best invest wisely.