Ideological dictators are immune to reason, logic, facts, and everything else which one can argue with. Greedy dictators are at least open to alternatives.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals." -- C.S. Lewis

Yes, because they have to; an embargo is a one-shot weapon which can never be undone. It also makes all countries, not just the embargoed one, more distrustful of trade relations.

No, because China is a dictatorship, and an ideological one at that, the least open to the free thought and innovation and cooperation that brings innovation. It's not that the USSR and Nazi Germany were incapable of innovation, but their engineers and scientists would have innovated more without having to look over their shoulders and wondering who was today's snitch.

I wondered about that too. Seems unlikely a lab would be that sloppy, but it also seems unlikely astronauts would be sloppy choosing and handling samples.

Another answer is that the Chinese water beads are very localized from some comet that hit nearby, and few other locations have such water beads.

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out over the next few years. I wonder if there's any way to detect these water beads from orbiting satellites.

The Apollo missions brought back a lot more mass, IIRC. Why did this water not show up in them?

A possible answer is that the Apollo samples were hand-picked by humans. Maybe they only selected rocks, not dirt and dust. Maybe such small pieces fell off during selection and inspection. Maybe the Chinese samples were picked up as scooped material.

I still remember one of the first "gumstick" web servers being posted here and promptly hacked, complete with a posting of the root credentials.

I did a bit of grey hat work and did something like `cat /proc/kmem` which at the time tried to read all of the kernel memory into kernel memory and was, well, bad for the server when run as root. But it may have saved it from further harm.

ID 16542 Checking in.

I had to look that up as I knew mine was lowish but it;'s been a decade since I looked at it.

Slashdotted!

Now the question is how many here now remember when that was a thing.

Part of me is laughing my ass off, Apple getting a bit of karma after their crazy design patent battles with Samsung over rounded corners on smart phones.

Live by the patent, die by the patent, or something. Better to innovate than copy, whether the copying is "legal" or not.

Argentina is not banning emoji, Italy is not requiring all babies to be dressed in pink or blue, and Morocco is not going to require GPS to tax bicycles by the mile.

-

Their selection is terrible compared to what it used to be. I'll sometimes see a reference to an old movie, especially film noir from the 1950s, check Netflix, it says I watched it 15 years ago and is now unavailable.

It's also the only way to get the bonus features -- commentary by the cast and crew, deleted scenes, and sometimes the "making of" features are interesting, like when there is lots of CGI or spectacular stunts.

I'd drop my DVD subscription in a heartbeat if ...

* You could stream bonus features.
* You could stream old movies.
* They'd make their streaming site useful.

I've found the best way to clear my mind before sleep is read something completely unrelated to anything else that requires no subsequent thinking. Sometimes owner's manuals for some new simple gadget. But the best by far is the short stories in Peck's series of Bad Boy stories. He wrote them for his Newspaper in the 1880s to increase circulation. They are 3-4 pages, a 5 or 10 minute read, with delightful illustrations. The Bad Boy is a teenager always getting into trouble, like putting signs in the grocer's produce -- "Cabbage the cat has slept in, 5 cents". The bad boy's father is a drunk, his mother is a saint, the grocer is a cheat, the preacher is a hypocrite. The bad boy lines his father's had with limburger cheese. He wraps a card deck in his father's pocket handkerchief and soaks it with rum so his church speech goes haywire. My favorite is when he learns the grocer has rigged a darning needle beneath a hole in the counter where the bad boy sits, with a string to pull and stab the bad boy. The bad boy puts a piece of wood in his pocket and sits down. While the grocer is leaning down to see what is wrong, the bad boy gives up his seat to the preacher who has just strolled in, the preacher gets stabbed, and the bad boy leaves as they are rolling around the floor.

They are not politically correct by any means, but they were in a family newspaper in the 1880s.

There are probably thousands of similar books. Find any collection of 5 minute reads, none with cliffhanger ends. Nothing does better at separating daytime thinking from nighttime nothing.

I remember discovering you could muck with the add tables to use any base less than 10. I don't remember now how the multiplication tables were organized and whether they could also be changed to different bases.

We did have 1311, but I don't remember address 00796 particularly.

A friend and I had a contest to see who could get the most instructions on one punched card. I won with, I think, 120, overlapping data and instructions. It typed THIMK over and over on the console typewriter. One sense switch changed the speed, another halted it. It was THIMK because the M was the halt instruction.

IBM 1620 Mod I (CADET -- Can't Add Doesn't Even Try) with 20K of BCD memory. Then a CDC 6400, a Univac SS 90, a 1620 Mod II, and an XDS 940 (supposedly a 930 modded as the 940 prototype). All were great fun, fantastic learning machines.

If you don't like my source then perhaps you can provide one that is better.

I just reviewed every result on the first page of Google search for: beef greenhouse climate. EVERY SINGLE ONE explains, in one way or another, that beef has a significant and grossly disproportionate impact on the climate. The Economist, Scientific American, The Guardian, Forbes, World Resource Institute, Vox, BBC, Science(published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science), Sciencedirect, the United Nation's FAO, and countless more. Take your pick. Or you could try
Environmental impact of meat production with over 200 sources cited.

Global warming in general, and the impact of beef in particular, are all way past the point where denialism requires actively avoiding and disregard wall-to-wall sources saying the same thing.

If we are concerned about the global warming impact of eating beef then I'm thinking we did so well with the big emitters of coal, petroleum, natural gas, cement, and metal refining, that we are looking to the teeny tiny impact of beef.

If you are bleeding from multiple wounds, I'm sure you know full well that was not a valid argument AGAINST bandaging the easily fixed bleeding immediately, while experts attempt to get the more severe and difficult bleeding under control.

We have not remotely halted global warming. We have barely begun to slow it down, due to decades of sabotage by denialists. The only way we can possibly solve this problem is a few percent at a time in many different ways and many different places. As all of the top Google search results explain, reducing beef consumption is the quickest and easiest thing we can do to immediately and significantly shift things several percent in the right direction. Several percent translates into years of difference, and a lower peak temperature.

As for the rest of your post, I very carefully checked and double checked. Not one sentence was remotely addressed how much impact beef does or does not have. I'm not sure why, but you spent four paragraphs 100% dedicated to arguing that your signature is false and absurd.

-