The Russians tried to send a sample return mission to Phobos. It failed to get out of Earth orbit. Eventually we'll probably do that though.

The impact hypothesis nicely explains why the moon is less dense than Earth: the impact preferentially threw up light elements from the crust and upper mantle, not heavy elements that would have sunk to the core. The densities of Phobos and Deimos are also less than that of Mars, but because they're so small, and are probably more like orbiting gravel piles, their densities are also consistent with small asteroids.

"many of the planets have orbits that are very near circular, but we do not interpret their existence in a similar fashion."

We do actually. It's pretty well accepted that the planets around the sun coalesced from a protoplanetary disc surrounding the young sun. The impact hypothesis for moon formation is similar: a big impact causes debris to be thrown into an orbiting disc around the planet and one or more moons then coalesce out of it. The alternative, capture of a separately orbiting body, isn't seriously considered for the origin of the planets.

Old fart Aussie software dev here, as recently as the early 90's Australia (and the US/UK) considered encryption techniques to be a "munition" for export purposes, it was illegal to export anything stronger than 48bit. Then some bloke put out some OSS called PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), he had stayed within the regulations by using something like #define BITLEN 48, but also given the world an algorithm that could be trivially changed to any arbitrary length and re-compiled. This created a legal paradox that drove the customs people nuts, there was a huge fuss about it at the time but eventually the various governments realised the regulations were unenforceable and dropped/ignored them.

Aussies made a huge mistake at the last election. This mob have managed to politically unite Aussies (against them) in a way I haven't witnessed since the downfall of Gough Whitlam (IMO - due to GW's "sore loser" re-election campaign). Trust us, we have mandatory voting and will boot this embarrassing mob out the first chance we get. There isn't a sector of Aussie society they haven't upset in the past year alone, the only chance the conservatives have of winning is if they put Turnbull back in charge and allow him to purge the "tea party" types from the current cabinet, they have way to much power for the tiny slice of Aussie society that they represent.

That's an excellent point, under the current rules in Oz, Uber and it's drivers should be classified and regulated the same as any other limousine service. All dispatcher services (including Uber) should be treated like the current taxi dispatchers, that is have their feet held to the fire if they fail to ensure they are supplying a licensed and insured driver whose vehicle meets mandated standards.

Ex taxi driver here. - When things go really bad what recourse do you have against the driver other than posting a bad review on Uber? How do you propose to force bad drivers out of the industry when you have torn up the rule book? Are you suggesting we simply hand the taxi industry to Uber on a silver platter secure in the knowledge they will police themselves - because freedom?

There are good (and bad) historical reasons for the constraint but that is irrelevant to the ideology you have espoused. Let's take my home town of Melbourne as an example, there are 10,000 medallions (or "plates" as they are known here), that $5B in small business assets that will become worthless overnight if we follow the ideological path your suggesting. I doubt Uber are willing to cough up $5B in compensation for the taxi owners of Melbourne, my guess is they are expecting the government to fund the inevitable plate buy-back that would accompany dropping the requirement for medallions.

BTW: A "market" is a set of rules (artificial constraints) that govern trade, (eg:property law). A "free market" is one that is open to all. Therefore the highly regulated taxi industry is a "free market" in the original sense of the term.

Whatever the reason, simply dropping the requirement for a medallion (where it already exists) means you are deliberately screwing people who have paid as much as a house to own one, worked for decades to pay it off, and plan to sell it to fund their retirement. Changing the medallion rules to suit Uber's business model means bankruptcy is a certainty for a lot a very hard working small business folk, or (more likely) a huge compensation bill for the city/state.

In other words, if you change the market rules by removing medallions from where they already exist, everyone loses except Uber. Fine if Uber were offering some massive social benefit that outweighed those costs, but it's not, it's just a bunch of dodgy cheap-labour capitalists running a dispatch center "on the internet".

All theories are rubbish until tested. There is no such thing as "proof" in Science, never has been, never will be. That's actually why Science is by far the best method we have found to describe and predict the behaviour of the universe.

The relativity of wrong.

Agreed, some people in this thread seem to equate "immoral" with "annoying". Advertising is simply a glorified way of shouting "hey, look at this" for personal gain, annoying but harmless. False advertising is simply lying for personal gain and clearly immoral.

Somebody stole your willpower?

Seriously though, I don't see the level of cooperation required for this project persisting long enough to pull it off.

Of course given history, there will be disruptions, but it'll work out in the end. They are easily startled - but they'll be back, and in greater numbers.

Meanwhile I can import seismic data from the early 1970s into current software without any conversion -

Strange, but that is exactly what I am doing at the moment. Or at least, I was doing until a few moments ago, when the task finished. Hi ho! back to the grindstone!

Further to Itzly's reply, nor are there any volcanoes anywhere near the Larson B ice shelf. There are probably sub-glacial volcanoes in the hinterland of some of the more southerly ice fields and sheets of West Antarctica, but from the absence of ash bands in the surrounding ice cores, they're pretty marginal on the activity front.

Oh, BTW, we know from studies of Icelandic volcanoes that even quite minor sub-glacial eruptions tend to produce substantial amounts of ash because of the violent emission of steam from interactions between lava and ice.

Your hypothesis is superficially reasonable but is destroyed utterly by the facts of the situation.