On Debian based systems this was never a problem.

Debian IIRC would ask you ~3 times (displaying big scary warnings that you better know what you are doing and Debian isn't responsible for the consequences of your actions) before it would let you uninstall a core OS package like glibc or text-tools or perl.

That is also reason why Debian rebuilds the initrd so often, seemingly redundantly, during the update. To make sure that even if system went down during the update, and there are updated kernel modules, chances are great that your system would remain in a bootable state.

The traditional problems of the RedHat systems where RPM lets you screw your system (or screws it on its own automatically; or refuses to do a trivial thing, you force it and it conveniently screws it for you) at least to me are long over.

not bore them to death trying all night to set up their mounts.

It took me about 15 minutes to polar align my first ever telescope, on it's first night after delivery. It's not rocket science, and it's not as difficult as you seem to think.

I will admit that the manual was pretty decent on this point, and I'm the sort of person who Rs T F-ing M before unpacking anything else. which isn't a normal 11-year-old's natural trait. But so what? On the first night, you set up the scope and get them hooked. First night is for seeing sights. If that works, then there will be other nights for them to learn the hobby. If the first night doesn't show enough goodies, then there won't be a second night.

Maybe so, but even under the US Fair Use doctrine

Irrelevant. The BBC is not governed by American law. (Hint : look at what the first "B" stands for.)

Slots apps are a good example of this. Virtually all of them will toss you a small amount of coins every four hours, and you gain levels by spending coins, so you can play more elaborate simulated slots, some of which only are playable for 30 minutes. Of course, if you don't want to wait the rest of the four hours, you can do in-app-purchases.

In fact, it seems most games on the smartphone tablet are this way... you need to consume/use "X" resource to gain levels to do more stuff... and the only way to do that quickly is to spend hundreds on some resource (coins, brains, smurfberries) to do so.

IMHO, a smartphone game that goes back to the pre-2011 IAP style of offering a decent game without forcing you to buy stuff -at all-, other than levels would be a hit. A good example of this would be "The Quest" game on iOS, which has a lot of additions to play through.

Nothing is 100%, but an air gap will force a black hat to either get someone physically on site, do some social engineering, or find someone that they can control to do their work for them.

By keeping stuff off the Internet, either air gapping or having a separate network with tightly controlled access points (or perhaps even something like a data diode [1]), it blocks all but the most well-heeled attackers, and big firms/governments are well adapted to deal with physical threats far more than stuff coming via the Internet.

[1]: I've taken two machines, each on a different network, plugged in a serial cable with one of the lines cut (so bits only moved one way), then used syslog on the secure network, and redirecting the port's output to a file on the insecure network. This wasn't fast, but it got data to people who needed it, while keeping stuff on the secure side off the Internet unless someone physically accessed it. A true data diode does the same thing, except faster... however expensive. As a hack, a dedicated line-level Ethernet tap might be something to be used because the computer plugged into the mirrored port will be unable to change or reply to the network stream coming from the secure side.

Actual growth of a reserve is much much rarer and much slower. It takes millions of years to cook a source rock and generate hydrocarbons ; it takes more millions of years for the hydrocarbons to migrate from source into a reservoir. Most ore deposits also take extended periods of time to form, with consequent slow absolute production rates.

When oil prices were rising (a joyful period - it's around 10 times the price now compared to when I entered the industry), there was a bunch of economists who'd make a lot of ill-informed comments about how the rising prices meant there was literally (not figuratively) an infinite supply of oil available. Which goes to show how delusional some economics professors can be. Some of these people really do need to go out and take a hammer to a lump of granite for an afternoon - it's both educational and therapeutic.

It also happens to men.

A former co-worker of mine, who just got a job in another state, had someone stick roofies in his drink at a party. He wound up stumbling to the wrong house, got brained with a baseball bat, and snagged both a criminal trespass charge (because he opened an unlocked door) and a PI charge. None of this he remembers. His memory is gone from when had a drinks at the party until he wound up waking up shackled to a hospital bed due to the head injury.

You may remember some kerfuffle a few years back with several oil companies admitting to 30 to 50% decreases in their predictions of production and reserves? Within the industry, that was viewed as a perfectly reasonable admission of the inherent uncertainties of the original predictions.

I honestly doubt that other extractive industries will have better resource estimates. Particularly when you get into Rumsfeldian known-knowns, unknown-knowns and unknown-unknowns. Which is where a lot of reserve and resource predictions lay.

"monumentally" ranks higher, imho

I've personally handled tens of thousands of LTO tapes, and I've had less than five go bad. Three had soft media errors (where there was no data loss, just stuff that ECC codes were able to handle), and two had issues with being handled by the grippers in the robot.

I've also have recently pulled data from DLT IV tapes from 1998, no errors.

Plus, tape isn't expensive. The hard part is the drives and libraries, as well as suitable backup software. Once past that, individual tape cartridges are quite inexpensive. $50 is about the highest I see LTO-6, and I've even seen them as low as $10 each in quantities.

At Facebook's level, RAIT is possible, so I don't get why they are bothering with relatively small capacity media when LTO is an established, highly reliable format, and can do everything FB wants without having to reinvent the wheel. Even encryption can be set on drives.

agenda is to shift money to untaxable locations and hide it (I thought that was EVERYONE's agenda),

If that's really your attitude then you must be some sort of right-wing tax-avoiding nut job.

American? That would explain it!

In addition to being illegal, [in-]effective[,] not soluble is water, and would not make hydrocarbons more mobile or more soluble. It would however, readily dissolve in hydrocarbon fluids, where it would be difficult and expensive to separate.

These are valid general objections. I'll add a genuine question from someone with 30 years experience in drilling oil wells - what the fuck would you expect it to do?

The only time I've seen carbon tetrachloride used on an oil rig (with the possible exception of in HVAC systems, which I just use but don't have to maintain or care about their details, and which might contain CCL4) is as a laboratory reagent for separating different densities of liquid hydrocarbons. Which is something you don't really need to do at the rig site (why would you want 10 different tankers or pipelines when you can just run one to the storage farm and on to the refinery after blending). Separating gaseous and liquid hydrocarbons is routinely done (strangely, in the so-called "separator" ; doh!), but just using simple physical properties ; separating out solids ("waxes") is also needed in some low-temperature fields to prevent "waxes" accumulating in pipes, tanks, etc. But again, you don't need CCl4 for that either.

I can't think of a reason to use anything more than traces of CCl4 on a drilling rig. Even for the lab uses we've replaced it with propan-2-ol or acetone.

about half a day of average power consumption in used battery storage. So, while we probably don't need that much storage it may be considered so inexpensive that we'll use it all.

Is there enough lithium in the world for that?

No, seriously? Is there enough lithium at a high enough concentration in ore minerals (e.g. spodumene, or other primary lithium sources), to make that quantity of batteries? Or would you need to depend on more esoteric accumulator cell chemistries such as the magnesium-based ones promised for the last decade or so?

How did that turn out? Did you get that house painted white again?

White man's immigration to America - and their genocides of the inhabitants - started well over 3 centuries ago, in large part as a colony for transportation of criminals and other undesirables. By two centuries ago the hecatomb of the native inhabitants was well under way using germs, steel and guns in approximately that order of importance. Though that's not the origin myth that your educational machines in Hollywood put out.

A bunch of relays (or pneumatic or hydraulic values for that matter) is not self-concious, and no amount of them however interconnected will become conscious, self-aware, or have feelings.

There's no reason to believe that's true.

Yet he states it as if true with the unshaking certainty that is normally associated with the raving lunatic (who has stopped taking their prescription drugs) or the religious. not that there is much perceivable difference between the tow groups.

I'm hoping my lunatic friend stops taking his medications again. When he's rational and dosed-up we both want to use his deranged ravings to found a religion and make us lots of money. Worked for Hubbard ; worked for Joe Random Swami ; worked for Sun Yun Moon ; worked for Moses ; no reason it shouldn't work for us too. You can sell the same claptrap repeatedly. just keep your sucker lists from one religion to the next.