IIRC, the half life of methane in the atmosphere is around a decade (loosely speaking) but it converts to CO2 in most of its degradation modes (like being eaten by bacteria).

But if you make the battery blow up, you can't track the phone anymore.

Why? I'm not considering supporting them, and I'm not considering their opposition, so why should i watch it? I'm sure I could see as bad if I went down to the hospital emergency room and waited for awhile.

I really don't think that snuff fliks add anything of benefit to human society, no matter who does them. What I find most repellant about this thing is that some people want to watch it. All states claim the right to decide when and for what to kill people, and this is just ISIS claiming that they're as good as any other government. (Some governments have decided not to kill people, but they have reserved the right to change their mind.)

The microgrid idea is attractive, and would work. Unfortunately, it appears inherently more expensive and less efficient. This would make it an extremely hard sell. It also decreased central control, so the govt. wouldn't be attracted to it, even if they didn't actually put up roadblocks.

FYI - I've written many daemons. In cases like this, a crash needs to stay down until the admin gets to it.
Why? A restart of the service may very well clear out any logs relevant to the crash.
This is especially true once the service starts relying on things like D-Bus where settings are live and can themselves be the source of the crash, but are not discovered until run-time and there's lots of network/bus talk to get to it.

So no, auto-restart is in 99% of cases NOT a feature.

From every experience I've had with systemd, I'd say that it is NOT progress. I don't want every little thing integrated in the manner systemd does.

And frankly, OpenRC is a lot better.

You did oversimplify. There's really no sense in talking about the "extent to which we are contributing" because of various positive feedback loops. I suppose that if you just say "we are a major contributor to global warming" you would on safe ground, but anything finer than that an things get really complicated. Even this article talked about how a warmer ocean causes increased release of methane....which causes a warmer ocean...which... (Well, the article didn't expressly mention that this was a loop. And only one of many.) Fortunately there are also some negative feedback loops...but they don't appear to be as strong. Or perhaps they're just slower. If deformation of the earth's crust (by melting the glaciers that acted as weights holding it down) sets off a chain of volcanos, then we may end up dealing with a global cooling problem.

FWIW, the drying out of western North America has caused deformation of the earth's crust in that area, as the weight of the water has been removed. It's only about (IIRC) 6cm/year, but volcanos have been active in the US west coast that had long been dormant. Probably a coincidence, but do look up the "Deccan Tapps". And remember that we can't yet predict volcanos or earthquakes.

It's true that most distros are committed to using systemd. That doesn't make it a good choice, and it was often a very narrow vote that approved it, because that are lots of things to hate about systemd. Also, a large number of people don't really trust the lead developer. And .... well, there are a large number of things not to like about it.

I'll probably wait to decide that I won't have anything to do with it for awhile, though. Perhaps it won't turn out to be as much of a blivet as it looks like. But in the meantime I'm going to be checking out alternatives. Just in case. If it's as bad as some have reported, I may be switching to some flavor of BSD.

It actually did need more than just streamlining, e.g. it needed to use multiple processors if available. But systemd seems "a bridge too far". OTOH, I prever grub over either lilo or grub2. Grub gave me enough control and was easy enough to understand for the simple features I wanted to use. Grub2 is inintelligible, and all the readable files say "warning: This file will be automatically overwritten". And lilo didn't give me any control over what what happening.

I'm not deep into systems administration, and I don't want to be. OTOH, I do want to configure my own system to do what *I* want. And what I want is often not what the designers of the software expect, even though it's well within the range of things handled by the software. So I dislike systems that are either too automagic or too inflexible. Systemd is, from all reports, too automagic, and simultaneously too inflexible. So I'm seriously thinking about switching to Gentoo or Slackware. Or even one of the BSDs, though I don't know enough to even guess which one. (I have a desktop orientation, not a server or minimalist orientation, but I need to do some server style jobs. Most Linux systems will handle this easily, but I think that some BSD systmes are too heavily oriented towards server setups.)

Personally, I elect not to watch it so as not to encourage more of it; and I do welcome YouTube et al removing the video, etc on the same grounds.

Now, if you want to make an argument for putting a PSA in front of the video, then you don't do it with a charity like the Red Cross. You do with several PSAs - one for the UN, and one for the viewer's country's Military enrollment, and across the world one for enrollment in the US Armed Forces. And you make sure all the PSAs are at least equal in length to the video with a big message of "hey, this is what the world will come to if you don't defend your freedoms".

This avoids the whole "profit" motive, etc that you would have with a charity as well. (And make no mistake, the Red Cross is a charity; a non-profit NGO.)

American of me? Yes. But in this kind of war, that kind of message will be the only way to really fight back - make it against their interest to post the videos to start with but providing more advertising for their enemy than for them, which is what the video is really about (a call to arms for the extremous).

But, as I said - personally I would just take it all down. But if you're going to do it, do it right.

No reason why that same kind of attack would not work on Windows or iOS either.

The Yellowstone Supervolcano wouldn't split the Earth apart at its seams any more than any of the other reasonable scenarios would. Even the collision that created the moon didn't do that. It might, however, kill off most people in the North American continent. And solve global warming at the same time.

The thing is, there's no real way to predict when, or if, it will go off again. There's some magma filling chambers under it, which has some people worried, but nobody knows whether or not its really significant.

No, most life on earth will survive any reasonable global warming scenario. Civilization surviving is much less certain. So while it wouldn't directly kill us, it might result, indirectly, in 90% of humanity dying. Not, repeat, *not* 90% of life on Earth...unless it resulted in all-out warfare between the mega-powers. All-out nuclear warfare could do that, I suppose.

6 is a bit strong for a foreshock, isn't it? I'm not quite sure.

Clearly it means the stress has shifted to another part of the fault, but is there any reason to believe that the next stress point will be as energetic? The fault I really worry about is the Hayward fault.