If we made "recklessly shooting into the woods" illegal, hunting enthusiasts and the NRA would be up in arms.

Besides which, there's no evidence such a thing happened with the drone - all we can tell from the video is that the drone was firing a pistol in the woods. It could perfectly well have been firing into the side of dirt hill that was off-camera. Maybe even someone's safely designed target shooting range.

Actually, from what I can find there's not really any correlation between nerves and acupuncture points. Some points fall along nerves, but far from all of them.

If nerves were simple copper wires you'd undoubtedly be correct, but they're not, they're sophisticated biological computation and communication devices whose poorly-understood functioning might be disrupted in any number of ways.

Also, there's not actually any correlation between nerves and acupuncture points - *some* points are located at nerve clusters, or where nerves enter muscles, but far from all of them.

Gah, thanks for reminding me... My father being a train buff, and his father working on the railroad for 45 years, I should have remembered to bring that up.

Such techniques are used in live environments today, such as factories, oil platforms etc. In fact, I'd be surprised if SpaceX DIDN'T have at least 6+ microphones or other vibration sensors relaying telemetry, and baselines from previous launches to compare with. With that baseline, you can tell if it happens to be a turbopump that malfunctions. Hell, if a strut or something would break in my brothers boat, we hear it immediately, because the overall vibration and thus overall boat noise will be altered.

Also, they clearly have decent bandwidth to the rocket during launch, given that they can have video feeds etc, and you can easily get multiple audio telemetry feeds to take less bandwidth than even a low-res video feed.

Using sound to probe structures, materials and devices is a pretty ancient technique, it's just advanced with the tools available. Stonemasons used to check blocks of stone to locate faults by tapping on them and listening for sounds that would indicate cracks or other faults. One of my grandfathers tried to teach me how to listen for potential rot zones in wooden walls when I was a kid also. Now, with modern tools, we can just do it much faster, and with more precision.

Really? I woiuld have thought, by any measure, the sheer size of the galaxy, let alone the universe, is the actual millstone. The delta v required to reach orbit (11.2 km/s) is only a quarter of the size needed to escape the gravity of the sun (42 km/s) and thus escape the solar system. Even then, you will get nowhere, the delta-v required to travel anywhere is measure in fractions of the speed of light, and any practical speed (for the purposes of travelling) is measured in units far above what we can hope to achieve. By way of example, it will take the fastest moving object we have sent to the edge of our solar system millions of years to reach the next star. The galaxy is billions of stars deep.

Clearly, then, if we want to actually explore the universe, we must find a away to do so that doesn't require physically moving a probe in the direction of interest. In which case, delta-v to orbit around earth, as challenging as that is, is generally irrelevant.

You say that like it's an unassailable force of nature. It's not. This has been a problem throughout most of human history, and there's a relatively simple solution: tariffs. No, they're not popular in our free-trade embracing modern political climate - but that climate was orchestrated at considerable expense by the wealthiest members of our nation - those who stand to make enormous profits from the arangement while the rest of us suffer. Because one of the truths of free trade is that, as you point out, in a free market all wages must inevitably fall to match those of the lowest-paid workers within the free-trade zone.

Either we must reinstate protectionist measures, or resign ourselves to remaking our country in the image of the worst oligarchies with whom we share free-trade agreements with.

Your problem is that you seem to think Obama is working for us, relatively normal Americans. He's not. He has arguably done a few things somewhat on our behalf, mostly symbolic, but by and large he works for the same billionaires that fund the campaigns of virtually all major politicians. And the policies that benefit those handful of ultra-rich rarely benefit the 99%. Things like enabling a flow of cheap, skilled, semi-indentured labor into the country to displace educated Americans with our outrageous expectations of decent pay and benefits that cut into corporate profits and executive bonuses.

This has been the case for decades, arguably centuries, though the problem has been accelerated precipitously since the Citizens United ruling that corporate spending is protected free speech. And it will only get worse until we the people rise up and refuse to vote for these corporate lapdogs, and show that our democracy cannot be bought indefinitely. Until then the problems can only be expected to get worse.

For now, it seems Bernie Sanders is the only credible candidate to run for president on such a platform in generations - and for that alone I would vote for him, even if I didn't agree with many of his positions.

[sarcasm]He probably is in front of several computer screens with several separate slashdot accounts available. He saves up mod points on those separate accounts and mods up his own posts [/sarcasm] I am being somewhat sarcastic here, but really, I cannot figure out how on earth mods would mark his post as insightful. As another poster responded, it is a series of fallacies, inaccuracies and outright lies.

Seriously though. I'm not familiar with how the mod points system works here, but it seems that I get points eventually when one of my posts gets modded up. Superficially, it seems that if I get 4 mods up (to 5) I get 5 points. That would be an increase of one point overall. To someone who knows, is it possible to have a series of accounts working in conjunction, modding each others posts up? What safeguards are in place to prevent this? Because it seems to me as a pseudo-outsider, that if 4 mods up makes five points, then if you kept your points for modding up posts within your group, that you would net-increase your points within the group. Am I wrong here?

True, but most infrastructure doesn't risk damage over thousands of square miles or potentially geologic timescales.

A good starting point would be to stop subsidizing fossil fuels by indemnifying producers and consumers from environmental damage caused by their negligence. I'm not even talking about global warming here - coal mining and power plants dump horrifying amount of toxic and radioactive waste into the surrounding environment - thousands of times more than is permissible for a nuclear plant. Oil producers have liability caps in case of spills that are laughable compared to the actual clean-up costs, and fracking is indemnified from any liability for ground-water contamination or geological destabilization (aka earthquakes), even if conclusively proven that they were responsible. Make them all bankroll the risks of their industry instead of offloading the expense to citizens, and the price of fossil energy would rapidly increase so much that the alternatives would be cheap in comparison.

Not so. Nuclear fuel isn't actually meaningfully radioactive - it's fissile, so when bombarded by neutrons it shatters (aka fissions), but leave it alone and it will decay so slowly that it emits essentially no radiation. Basically the longer the half-life, the less radioactive the material, and nuclear fuel has a very long half life - it has after all been present since long before our planet formed from the remnants of ancient supernovas. Uranium-235, the most common fuel, has a half-life of 700 million years. Plutonium-239, the other common fuel, has a half-life of "only" 24,000 years, but the banana you just ate is still far more radioactive than a warehouse full of freshly refined nuclear fuel.

Shatter it in a fission reactor though, and the resulting fragments tend to be very radioactive. Some are *extremely* radioactive, with half-lives in the range of hours to weeks, but store those for a few years and they pretty much completely decay into inert atoms, so they aren't a big problem. Dealing with those is why spent fuel typically has a "cooling off period" of a few years before being shipped away from the nuclear plant.

Most fragments though have half-lives in the range of a few months to many years - short enough to be dangerously radioactive, but long enough to present some challenges for storage - it will take many centuries to decay to safe levels. Still, bury it in a nice deep hole in good dry, stable ground, and it will probably decay to safe levels before it manages to escape. Something like Yucca Mountain would likely be well suited to this.

The REAL problem though is that current reactor designs only consume a few percent of the fuel, and then we go and store that highly radioactive waste still all mixed in with the 90+% of unused fuel. And that gives us the worst of both worlds - it's highly radioactive, and as the waste decays it releases a bunch of energetic neutrons which cause some of the surrounding fuel to fission, creating fresh new waste to replace the stuff that just went inert. The combination of waste and fuel will thus remain dangerously radioactive until all the fuel has been converted to waste, a process that will take tens to hundreds of thousands of years. And on those timescales there's no realistic way to contain it reliably, you're starting to get into geological timescales there, and there's no longer any such thing as stable ground.

THAT is why fuel reprocessing (or radically better reactors) are important - not just because it reduces the amount of waste, but because it simultaneously radically reduces the time it will take that waste to become inert, down to timescales where human ingenuity can at least hope to contain it.

Nah. "Depleted" implies that at some point in the past there was a greater concentration. From what I've seen and read, rational humans have always been only slightly more common than unicorns. At best we find the occasional person who is moderately rational in their approach to one or two relatively small fields of endeavour.