I just recently salvaged a cd-wallet from my car after it was vandalized, many of these disks have been in there for about ten years, in rather extreme environment - the temperature in that car gets up to about +70C in direct sunlight during summer, and has occasionally dropped down to -30C in winter, and I'm sure the moisture levels vary just as dramatically.

Most of them seem to work just fine, cdparanoia doesn't even report any error correction coming into play - and when they do fail, it seems to be because of scratches, not spontaneous degradation. These aren't particularly high quality media either, most of them are cheapest junk I could buy - why waste money on the best when it's just car audio collection in conditions that (or so I thought) will kill even the best media in few years at most?

Ornithopters most certainly do use lift, and the thrust component of them also depends on atmospheric density just like on normal planes. How the hell do you think they work? By magic? Antigravity?

Conventional aircraft are perfectly capable of flying on Mars, they just need a large wingspan and must fly very fast, which is somewhat counterproductive on an exploratory vessel that presumably needs some time to study things rather than zipping by at bajillion MPH, so flapping wing designs are a bit better due to the lift generated not being related to horizontal speed, but by no means the only ones possible.

Indeed, losing either of those two probably wouldn't cause any issues - but you also lose vacuum boosters for power brakes and that is a problem, especially if the driver doesn't know it will happen.

Not really. There aren't any settlements on southern hemisphere that are anywhere as near to the pole as there are in the north, and that quite obviously limits the show a lot.

Southern tip of Tasmania is 44 degrees south. Most of Europe and almost entire Canada is closer to the north pole than that is to south! We have _cities_ 70 degrees north, you'd have to live on Antarctica to match that on the south pole.

Right. It just means something contagious that is spreading widely (doesn't have to be worldwide, just a very large area).

Things like common cold* are not classified as pandemic, because they've already stabilized. It's already present in the whole world, and not spreading into new populations any more. If cold cases would suddenly start to skyrocket, then maybe... or if cold was eradicated from large areas and did a comeback.

*) Common cold might not count as a pandemic even if it did meet the spreading criteria, since it doesn't have a single causative agent - it's just an umbrella term for a wide variety of mild respiratory tract infections.

I'm aware of the costly roaming fees, hell we see a few newspaper articles every year where some poor soul is hit by ginormous bills when their phone/laptop/whatever decides to connect to Russian network from a ski resort near the border.

But the parent was claiming extortionate data rates with no mention of any special circumstances, implying they're extremely expensive even within your country of residence.

I don't know which part of EU you're in, but at least here in Finland, unlimited data costs 10/month for 384kbps and 14 for max speed, not exactly free but I wouldn't call it "very" costly, much less a fortune.

One person, modded troll, called you a shill. Clearly, that's everyone. Or maybe it's just an easy way of waving away all the others without answering the perfectly valid questions they asked?

Critizicing Linux is reasonably likely to raise some controversy around these parts, but that's not what caused the outrage. Stating dubious opinions like "Linux hasn't changed at all in fifteen years" and "installing applications requires in-depth knowledge" as facts without reasoning them at all is what does that. If you want to criticize, then do so by all means, but your post was NOT criticism, that implies analysis and evaluation.

You're being really disingenious here. What you are doing is NOT just editing a text file, and you know it. It's editing a text file OWNED BY ANOTHER USER, AND modifying advanced system configuration without using the provided settings tools. Something you would do in windows with regedit.

So, just how "easily" do these things work in Windows 7? Let's see:

1) Editing a text file owned by another user. Open it in notepad, edit, try to save. What happens? It just silently shifts to "save as" dialog instead of saving, NO UAC dialog for privilege elevation, it won't even tell you it can't save the original file, much less why not. Gee, really intuitive, much better than in Ubuntu!

2) Editing a registry key you don't have permissions to edit. Open regedit, navigate to the key, try to change: Oops. "Cannot edit XXX: Error writing the value's new contents.". NO UAC dialog, no telling WHY you cannot edit that. Yep, real simple.

Perhaps not, but knowing that a "setup.exe" is even required for the computer to function properly and where to find it certainly does require above average knowledge.

WTF? If you're going for this sort of pedantry, you really shouldn't make this kind of dumb mistakes. |DOES NOT redirect STDERR in any shell I know of, therefore the error would be shown to the user.

I don't know where you got the idea that this is supposed to be a cure-all, it's not. There's some promising research on few specific autoimmune disorders - mostly on Crohn's disease - and a lot more ongoing on this, the theory is pretty sound, not quackery (though it's probably too early to tell if it turns out to work, so the same can't necessarily be said for the peddlers).

The helminths used are hookworms and whipworms. As you say, hookworms can cause anemia, and I think the same is true for trichuris as well, but that's because in "natural" infestations there are often thousands of them. AFAIK, it's been pretty well established in parasitology long before anyone thought they might have any benefit that infections with small number of worms are almost always asymptomatic. The species used aren't capable of causing autoinfection either so the load stays constant. It does appear reasonably safe - and the drugs for getting rid of the darn things are well known and very effective if someone does go wrong.

There are quite a few opportunistic pathogens that are non-specialized, eg. soil bacteria that are normally free-living but if you're exposed with a weakened immune system or manage to get them into a wound, you may be in trouble. I imagine some space bugs might be dangerous in similar way, but indeed, spreading like wildfire from people to people is a mere fantasy - unless it's genetically engineered by the Evil Aliens(TM), of course.

Is that so? Funny, considering Paris already had a population of tens of thousands over a thousand years before Tenochtitlan was anything but a mount of mud, and had 250000 people around the time Aztecs started building their city in 1300's.

Here is a map of Paris a hundred years before Tenochtitlan was established. Feel free to hang it on the wall for your viewing pleasure.

How is this relevant? Earth did not have ozone layer before it had life. Life made the ozone layer possible (by pumping the atmosphere full of oxygen), not the other way around.

Very probable, considering the said liquid, no matter "weird" it is, is the most common molecule in the freaking universe.