How does "hide the user's identity" == "evading the law"?

Guten Tag, mate.

the sort of spectacular, over-the-top attraction Dubai is known for.

Carefully chosen words. It's not insane to conceive of future humans deliberately tracking the Voyagers down. Then selling them on eBay. It's not very likely, but it's not impossible.

the sort of spectacular, over-the-top attraction Dubai is known for.

"Spectacular", yes. "Over-the-top", certainly.

"Attraction?"

It's in fucking Dubai. That in itself makes it as attractive as a dose of syphilis.

(OK,I'll admit to having had to work in that area - there are a few nice people in the working classes, but most of the locals and ex-pats are a bunch of bastards.)

This. Exactly this. When any law enforcement agency suspect that I am guilty of a crime, I have the right to remain silent.

In America, maybe.

This isn't a story about America ; it's a story about England, where they have different laws.

I'm less and less tolerant of hokey marketing filled with superlatives. I value stability and clarity.

That's easy. Just program in C.^H^H assembler. 8086 real mode assembler.

FTFY.

Who made Microsoft the fucking internet police anyway?

@tom_watson stated on Twitter (now that I've added to his 100k+ followers) at 9:18 AM - 10 Jul 2014

Statement on Comms Data and Interception confirmed for this morning. MPs have not seen the BIll that will be railroaded through next week.

The original message from Tom Watson is at https://medium.com/@tom_watson...

Sounds indeed like they're up to something.

Tom Watson is an enemy of powerful people. "According to the Sun newspaper, Watson is a fundamentalist zealot who denounces any deviation from socialism. MP and author of a book on corruption by NewsCorp."

If the Sun hate you, as well as the rest of Murdoch's Empire of Evil, then you must be doing something right.

Did I get FP?

The yellowstone caldera - that thing is the nation killer, possibly world-killer if it ever goes up.

It's not "if it ever goes up" ; it's "when it goes up AGAIN" ; there have been 4 or 5 major eruptions of Yellowstone in the last couple of millions of years.

"World-killer"? Evidently not. Nation-killer? Possibly. Very destructive, when it next goes off? Certainly.

Am I concerned? See 2 minutes into this video.

Do you think they're al going to be set off at once?

If they did that, how would they know if they're listening to a delayed echo from shot point #7, indicating a magma chamber at 17km depth, or a differently-delayed echo from shot point #13, indicating a magma chamber at 27km depth, or a differently-delayed echo from shot point #4, indicating a magma chamber at 7km depth, or a differently-delayed echo from shot point #2, indicating a magma chamber at 2km depth, ...

It gets repetitive, doesn't it? That's why deconvolving seismic data is, and always has been, a major consumer of computing resources.

Watch some video of a seismic array being shot. They (well, "we" - I do some seismic-while-drilling work, though I don't claim to be an expert) fire one gun at a time, then listen for an appropriate number of seconds (the "two-way time" to collect the echoes. Then they fire the next gun in the array (or wait for the gun to re-charge, if there's only one gun), and listen for the echoes ... it gets repetitive. With every shot (hundreds of thousands in a survey) recorded up to kilohertz for each of up to thousands of hydrophones, each one of which has it's GPS position recorded at all times in the recording phase (because where things are matters) ... you rapidly climb through the tens of terabytes of data.

proposals to strip mine areas

There are intermittent efforts to develop various mineral resources in that area. But the details in the press are limited. What I can see is compatible with anything between literally tearing a mountainside apart and turning it into dust to driving an adit into the hillside and following a vein. That's a large variety of different mining techniques.

The people of the area have procedures for assessing environmental damage likelihood, and for balancing the likely effects of employment in a mining operation versus the (possible / probable) loss of tourism income. I'll let them argue that question.

Meanwhile, at the weekend I'm thinking of going up a very nice mountain which I know, but where there is ongoing disagreement between the locals (who want to develop a gold mine and have jobs to keep the young men in the area) and the regional capital (who want to keep the hillside pretty for tourism). And as both a geologist (interested in the minerals) and a mountaineer (who loves the whole area), I'm going to keep my mouth shut and my ears open.

As I say up-thread, the important issue is the length of fracture that you can create with your explosion, and whether that penetrates far enough into the volcano (cylinder) to increase the stress level in the remaining material to the point at which the fracture will continue to propagate after the fracture initiating event (explosion).

Understanding fracture propagation is a pretty basic part of materials science, and (probably) fundamental to many courses in mechanical engineering. (I'm a geologist, and we covered it un structural geology. But mechanical engineers of my acquaintance when I was a student studied the same material at a different part of their course. They also did a bit of geology - you need a bit to understand what you're building foundations in/ on.)

Try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for a starter.

Incidentally, I've seen a charged compressed air cylinder fall 10m and land on rough boulders. With about 250bar of air inside, we leapt for shelter, expecting it to go off like a bomb, but it didn't. So, somewhat gingerly, the person who dropped it came down the rope and carried on "Sherpa-ing" it into the cave where the diver was going to use it. We gave the a hydraulic test the next day, and it passed, but with that dent in it, it was never going to pass a visual inspection, so it was relegated to the back of the club's air bank.

I don't recommend treating cylinders like that, but they're not as delicate as you'd think. Well, not the steel ones ; I don't know anyone who uses aluminium tanks.

Last name was Smith or Jones or something, didn't catch the first name.

Alias?

Wearing my "Rig Geologist" hard hat, I'd not say that.

Even nuking the volcano would not cause an eruption.

You could trigger an eruption with a relatively small explosion - enough to displace a few hundred cubic metres of rock - BUT only if the volcano were already on the brink of erupting already. You'd need to have magma or gasses to within a few hundred metres of surface.

You'd feel the earthquakes from the rising magma for at least several days before the event. You might not notice the earthquakes - if you had a lot of background seismic activity, for example - but getting magma from a deeper magma chamber to within a few hundreds of metres of the surface would result in both earthquakes and also appreciable ground movement. Which is precisely why volcanic observatories deploy networks of local seismographs, tilt-meters, and latterly (D)GPS stations to, errr, observe the volcano they're trying to observe.

Basically, I agree with you. But we do have techniques capable of causing fractures in rocks for up to several hundreds of metres, so there is a necessary caveat.

(Just to poke a popular screaming point for the geologically ill-informed, most oil and gas wells subjected to fracking are several kilometres below any exploited aquifers. but fracking fractures rarely exceed a couple of hundred metres in length.)