Your fillings will not melt. The tiny junctions in intergated circuits and the smaller types of transistor will. My guess is that your fillings might rise in temperature by 1/10 degree, you would hardly notice.
It is rumoured that these things have been used a fair number of times in the cities by morons who want to disrupt computer systems etc. The electrically powered type is easy to make, but might take a while to charge up before each pulse. It is quite simple to generate nanosecond pulses of millions of amps, even a spark gap at the focal point of a parabolic antenna, fed by a nice sharp, high voltage pulse from a Marx generator, will do a lot of mischief.
Sadly, the military have abandoned EMP protection, it will be very simple indeed to bring down the current generation of fly-by-wire aircraft for example. Because an EMP pulse is much faster than lightning, with much greater high frequency content, the lightning protection on the critical systems of modern civil aircraft (Airbus and Boeing 777) may also be ineffective.
The only reason why such weapons are not widespread is that the inverse square law makes them fairly useless except against localised targets with high electronic content. It is also quite difficult to prevent some of the energy going where you don't want it, no use driving past Redmond, firing one off in your car as you go, if it takes out your engine management computer, and your brakes, as well as killing Bill's PC.
Probably one or more simple mutations due to cell damage. Because a bacterium reproduces by dividing itself, you only need one mutant to start a new strain, the statistics of that happening are immensely favourable compared to so-called evolution, which in creatures which reproduce sexually is a non-starter statistically.
One cell, out of countless zillions, gets zapped in a favourable way, and you have, in a shortish time scale, a colony. As the environment changed, this would be repeated, who knows how many intervening forms there were between something normal and this.
It is also quite possible that many odd single-cell organisms exist in nature, but don't develop into noticeable quantities until the environment is optimum. Strange things abount at the volcanic vents on the sea floor, for example, maybe even around the caustic soda volcano in the African Rift Valley, and it is not impossible to postulate mechanisms whereby one of these could have been transported. It is a long journey for a bacterium, but not necessarily for a geologist's boot, for example.
An interesting experiment would be to take some of these, and put them in an environment which is then slowly brought back to normal. If the mutations are due to an equilibrium process, successive generations ought to contain a small proportion of their precursor, all the way back to the original.
BTW the environment is nowhere near caustic soda or paint stripper, a pH of 12.8 in nature is quite abnormal but not quite that extreme. Calcium hydroxide is only lime, the stuff you mix with cement to make bricklaying mortar a bit more useable, it does not immediately burn human skin like caustic soda (sodium hydroxide). Medium to long term, it would do you no good of course. Farmers put it on their fields to deal with acid soils. I don't think that when they do thisw, they kill all or the organisms in the soil. The alkaline earth elements (second column of the periodic table) and their compounds are very much less reactive than the alkalais (first column). Having said that, please don't play with calcium oxide (quicklime)!
Nevertheless, an interesting discovery, but it would be better without the sensationalism.
One hopes that the parties concerned will behave like gentlemen and sort this out between themselves without setting their lawyers on each other, thus proving that the world of open source can behave in a civilised manner, unlike Mr. McBride. There is much to gain from a fair and just settlement being achieved quickly. It seems to me that if pushed to the limit, Red Hat will need to back down, but not knowing all the details, that may not be so. It may even be that the names can exist simultaneously as they refer to quite different products, eg if one company made a Fedora car, and another created a Fedora breakfact cereal, there would not normally be a conflict.
Now as one product is an application, and the other a complete OS suite, they are fairly different things. It might not be unreasonable for them to settle by calling one Fedora Repository, and the other Fedora Linux, for example. It would also be decent if each put a link to the other on their web site and a mention on their package or hardcopy manual. That would be in the spirit of what open source is all about, and would be to the mutual benefit of both parties.
But, if it descends to the lower regions of civilisation where lawyers lurk to releive everyone of their hard-earned cash, the image of open source is damaged, and we are on a level with Gates, Ballmer, McBride etc. Please do not let this happen.
To prevent future problems, maybe someone like the FSF, in conjunction with other relevant parties encompassing other variants of open or free software, could coordinate the naming of future projects, so there would be no need for conflicts to happen in the future. By avoiding conflict and any kind of heavy-handed approach, there is much to be gained for everyone. While the chief proponents of closed-source bugware waste their time and energy suing each other, the open source movement should be producing useful applications.
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It is rumoured that these things have been used a fair number of times in the cities by morons who want to disrupt computer systems etc. The electrically powered type is easy to make, but might take a while to charge up before each pulse. It is quite simple to generate nanosecond pulses of millions of amps, even a spark gap at the focal point of a parabolic antenna, fed by a nice sharp, high voltage pulse from a Marx generator, will do a lot of mischief.
Sadly, the military have abandoned EMP protection, it will be very simple indeed to bring down the current generation of fly-by-wire aircraft for example. Because an EMP pulse is much faster than lightning, with much greater high frequency content, the lightning protection on the critical systems of modern civil aircraft (Airbus and Boeing 777) may also be ineffective.
The only reason why such weapons are not widespread is that the inverse square law makes them fairly useless except against localised targets with high electronic content. It is also quite difficult to prevent some of the energy going where you don't want it, no use driving past Redmond, firing one off in your car as you go, if it takes out your engine management computer, and your brakes, as well as killing Bill's PC.
One cell, out of countless zillions, gets zapped in a favourable way, and you have, in a shortish time scale, a colony. As the environment changed, this would be repeated, who knows how many intervening forms there were between something normal and this.
It is also quite possible that many odd single-cell organisms exist in nature, but don't develop into noticeable quantities until the environment is optimum. Strange things abount at the volcanic vents on the sea floor, for example, maybe even around the caustic soda volcano in the African Rift Valley, and it is not impossible to postulate mechanisms whereby one of these could have been transported. It is a long journey for a bacterium, but not necessarily for a geologist's boot, for example.
An interesting experiment would be to take some of these, and put them in an environment which is then slowly brought back to normal. If the mutations are due to an equilibrium process, successive generations ought to contain a small proportion of their precursor, all the way back to the original.
BTW the environment is nowhere near caustic soda or paint stripper, a pH of 12.8 in nature is quite abnormal but not quite that extreme. Calcium hydroxide is only lime, the stuff you mix with cement to make bricklaying mortar a bit more useable, it does not immediately burn human skin like caustic soda (sodium hydroxide). Medium to long term, it would do you no good of course. Farmers put it on their fields to deal with acid soils. I don't think that when they do thisw, they kill all or the organisms in the soil. The alkaline earth elements (second column of the periodic table) and their compounds are very much less reactive than the alkalais (first column). Having said that, please don't play with calcium oxide (quicklime)!
Nevertheless, an interesting discovery, but it would be better without the sensationalism.
and top of the list, Redmond.
One hopes that the parties concerned will behave like gentlemen and sort this out between themselves without setting their lawyers on each other, thus proving that the world of open source can behave in a civilised manner, unlike Mr. McBride. There is much to gain from a fair and just settlement being achieved quickly. It seems to me that if pushed to the limit, Red Hat will need to back down, but not knowing all the details, that may not be so. It may even be that the names can exist simultaneously as they refer to quite different products, eg if one company made a Fedora car, and another created a Fedora breakfact cereal, there would not normally be a conflict. Now as one product is an application, and the other a complete OS suite, they are fairly different things. It might not be unreasonable for them to settle by calling one Fedora Repository, and the other Fedora Linux, for example. It would also be decent if each put a link to the other on their web site and a mention on their package or hardcopy manual. That would be in the spirit of what open source is all about, and would be to the mutual benefit of both parties. But, if it descends to the lower regions of civilisation where lawyers lurk to releive everyone of their hard-earned cash, the image of open source is damaged, and we are on a level with Gates, Ballmer, McBride etc. Please do not let this happen. To prevent future problems, maybe someone like the FSF, in conjunction with other relevant parties encompassing other variants of open or free software, could coordinate the naming of future projects, so there would be no need for conflicts to happen in the future. By avoiding conflict and any kind of heavy-handed approach, there is much to be gained for everyone. While the chief proponents of closed-source bugware waste their time and energy suing each other, the open source movement should be producing useful applications.