Troofers believe in a whole bunch of things [...] that their psychic abilities aren't psychotic episodes,

Very nicely rude. Class insult. Well done.

Being elsewhere is my mechanism too. Despite having spent some of the last month working in Istanbul, which is not high on any sensible list of low-risk places.

But for pay, I'm prepared to take the risk.

I could just walk over to the sound to get sea water that could be easily distilled

I think it would be very instructive for you to try putting that plan through a trial run. Distilling water takes a hell of a lot of fuel. A hell of a lot.

(I used to run alcohol sills on various occasions.)

200,000 floaters, eh? That's a pretty good score, and higher than I'd generally expected for the expected Cascadia quake. But I still think that for the first megadeath quake, you're still probably looking at the Ganges plain. which is as badly overdue as Cascadia, but has much poorer building codes, infrastructure resilience, enforcement of building codes, and more aggressive microbiology.

Well, the last major quake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone was January 26, 1700 at about 9:00 PM,

No white man saw it, so it didn't happen.

(Yes, I am being sarcastic. But that's not far from the thinking of no small number of YECs.)

I work out in the real world and have spent about 8 months overall living and working on a coral reef, out observing every couple of days. That's probably more time than your collection of aquarium shop staff added together. I note that you don't claim to bring any field experience to the discussion.

As we say at work, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. And then we go and show the theoreticians that their theories are incomplete representations of reality.

Nobody sane "goes to Africa" to get their own supply of rhino horn. There's a well-established black market into which end users tap, and locally-based poachers supply. And every pair of hands along the way ramps up the price. If it's a factor of 2 every step of the way (typical for markets), then a poacher 10 steps from the end market may only receive a few hundred dollars for shooting a rhino and hacking off the horn.

The object of this exercise is to wreck "trust" at each stage of the pipeline, to the point that it is not economically attractive for the poachers to do the "hunt and kill a rhino" step. If it bankrupts intermediate dealers, that's an side benefit.

I'm by no means convinced it will work It's an interesting idea, probably worth following; but whether it works, fast enough, is a more open question.

Of course, if they could incorporate some horrible diseases with the rhino fake, so the end customers died, painfully and with obvious blue buboes, that would be even better. But that might trouble some people's ethics.

make sure nobody got hurt and don't start a fire you can't put out.

"Sand won't save you this time". Obligatory any time someone mentions not stating fires in the context of chemistry experiments.

For those who need a taster,

if there was anything that would go on to set the [wet] sand on fire.

Eh? set and on fire?

Let's put it this way: during World War II, the Germans were very interested in using [the compound of interest] in self-igniting flamethrowers, but found it too nasty to work with.

That's a good start, considering that the Germans in WW2 used some pretty ... vigorous ... chemistry.

a practical consequence of that is that itâ(TM)ll start roaring reactions with things like bricks and asbestos tile

More "Eh?"

It burned its way through a foot of concrete floor and chewed up another meter of sand and gravel beneath, completing a day that I'm sure no one involved ever forgot. That process, I should add, would necessarily have been accompanied by copious amounts of horribly toxic and corrosive by-products:

By now, anyone who is worried about the chlorine in water sterilisation should be running away, and anyone with a solid footing in chemistry will be donning the leather aprons and steel blast-shields and edging cautiously to the front of the lab. Fun stuff!

a rope wound on a 0.5m diameter capstan

You pick up 0.5 m diameter capstans on reguar brasis?

People who seek out things that everyone else has dismissed for (usually) good reasons.

I suspect that TFA is looking for precisely other people. But to make the point, I'll voilate Slashdot's normal procedure by R-ing TFA ... and then to TFA's TFA ... which has dumped the article. Well, [SHRUG] then. At least I tried.

Some of us think carefully about tech trends, but get it wrong. When I was looking to replace my trusty 386 with a 486 (WITH a co-processor this time), I thought carefully about whether to go for VL-bus or PCI. I thought about it for months. Went for VL-bus.

A while later (2 years?). mindful of the increasing clarity of the VL-bus mistake, I wanted more hard drive space. MFM had done it's stuff, and I'd reaped the 50% capacity increase from switching to an RLL controller (and of course running the firmware routines associated) .. .and Idecided that the way to go was SCSI. IDE drives were out, but I thought SCSI was the way to go for the commodity desktop. [Bzzzt!]

What came next? It was probably graphics card wars. Endless struggles to get a nice jiggle to Lara Croft's tits. I deliberately ducked that one (besides, it would mean going form Dos 6.22/ Win3.11 "up" to Win 95. Well, I resisted that for several years. And decided to go for an OS/2 system. (Actually, the boot manager for that re-paid my efforts quite profitably. But that's a side-line. Incidentally, I was also wishing for a reliable system for mounting/ dismounting hard drives, because I was also experimenting with Linux at the time too.) For that, I stuck with the SCSI gear I'd still got. I also started writing CDs, also on SCSI. That all worked, but commodity technology had gone the other way by the time that the burglars relieved me of the hardware.

I pretty much gave up after that. Laptops + USB, and stay a long way back from the cutting edge.

If you see me with a new technology, don't follow.

Never tried one myself, but unless I've deeply misunderstood things, they allow you to build your own choice of modules into your own design of system?

For QC of the build process, I'd expect the purveyors of "build your own distro" distros to ask to know what they need to play with (not everyone will answer. [SHRUG]). so, surely a first step would be to look at their buld records and feature request lists.

Start with the closest living relative. Change the major parts, that you know of. See how the results look. Keep adding bits and pieces as you can, getting closer to the lost species

Your generation time is 2 decades (human like). Have your ungrateful grandchildren continued with your project? Did they even try to continue seeking funding for your experiment after your retirement?

And because every copy of Hacking Team's Galileo software is secretly watermarked,

If this were even moderately uncommon software (e.g. a global market of tens of thousands or fewer), and moderately valuable (ten thousand dollars per seat-year, or so) then I'd expect the vendor to have put in some sort of watermarking as part of the license validation software. I'm pretty sure that our software (which works in this region) incorporates the putative license number and the 16-byte serial number of the hardware dongle in it's packets attempting to negotiate a connection with a license server. Which allows us to know if the serial numbers of the software or dongles have leaked out of the contexts (net blocks) in which they should occur. We advertise this to our clients as "proactive monitoring for the security of their data" ; whether, or how-much, we charge them is a question for Beancounter-Central.

You seem to be assuming that this is a trade between sitting all the time or standing all the time. Not so. The "ideal" situation is an adjustable desk that will let you sit or stand. You then do each part of the day.

A few months ago I was "guesting" in an office with a "no personal desk" policy (i.e. nothing can be stored locally ; network storage must be used). About 1/4 to 1/5 of the desks were standing desks, and I'd see different people using the standers on different days. Some people would spend some time uisng a standing desk to process and display their 4-d data, and interpret it, while switching between data-caressing sessions to doing administrivia and report-writing on the adjacent sitting desk. The next day, they'd do the data-caressing at the sitting workstation, and the administrivia at the standing desk.

The set up seemed to be designed to encourage variety of work practices and work sequences, without mandating what those variations would be. It did seem to work, and After a month driving a desk, I suspect that some variation is definitely better than none.

The programmer was incompetent, and never should have been writing critical code.

If it's "critical code," then no single programmer should have been working on it any way. At the very least, one should have been writing test modules for the other programmer's work, and neither of them having overall control of the system development. But that still allows a serious hole for group think in ... well, precisely the UI areas.

It's a fair example. And as my colleague-who-shares-an-office-with-me likes to point out, "These rules are written in someone's blood."