Cubit tape measure - scroll to the bottom. It's $6.50.

(Yes, I'm aware of what day that became available.)

Gold: certain types of asteroids contain a decent amount of gold (and platinum group metals). After all, that's where all the gold in the Earth's crust came from.

Diamonds: There was a theory that Jupiter and Saturn had diamond cores. Hard to get to, though. It was a plot point in the book 2069: A Space Odyssey.

Oil: Methane is common (Uranus and Neptune have a shitload of it) and we're pretty sure Titan has lakes of ethane, methane, and propane. It rains methane there. I'm not a geochemist, but I imagine that given the abundance of hydrocarbons on the surface, there probably is something similar to crude oil underneath formed by pressure and time. I could be talking out my ass about the last one though.

You're thinking couleur.

See the oxford entry which includes the French word.

Funny, the brits have been telling the Americans that for a while now.

Methinks you misunderstand what the left's trying to do.

The idea behind the left, at least in America, is for the government to provide services to the citizens in liu of corporations where it makes sense to do so. The argument within the left is "where does it make sense to do so." They tend to favor regulation more than the right, especially when it will create what they think of as a "level playing field."

The left believes that things like health care will never be properly provided by the free market, and want the government to provide it instead.

The left, in general, are not after government control of the populace. That's actually more associated with the right - specifically the religious right. The leftist politicians that support government control everywhere do so not because they're left, but because they're politicians - they wouldn't be politicians if they didn't want power over people.

People tend to get the "American left" confused with "global left", which is another thing entirely (communism, welfare states, etc.). There are some lefties in America that do believe in those, of course - just like some Americans believe in the extreme right - but they're very much in the minority. What we have here is the problem you get with a two-party system - everything tends to fall into one or the other party and gets associated with it. Gun control is a perfect example - Americans tend to think of it as a "left" issue, but it's really not - it's just associated with the Democratic party.

Then there's "California left," which wants to control what color of paint you can have on your car. Sometimes I think the whole state over there is one big overgrown neighborhood association.

No, my argument requires you to realize the difference between the NSA and those who want to commit fraud.

Thieves will be deterred by technical means. The NSA will not be. Securing yourself against thieves is still preferable to not securing yourself at all.

I certainly don't expect you to trust the NSA, but from a practical standpoint it doesn't matter for most of us. They're not interested in us.

If you want to fight the NSA, you have to do it politically. It's their only weak point.

You know, I hate the patriot act with every fiber of my being, but that argument doesn't quite hold water.

The NSA doesn't care about your money. They don't need to blackmail you. If they want you, they can come and get you. They don't affect the vast majority of Americans. I don't care for them spying on me, but in reality the vast majority of us (myself included) will never see anything become of it.

Thieves and fraudsters, on the other hand, have a definite desire to have your money. They will get it by any means necessary. You need protection against them.

You'll never have a foolproof defense against the NSA. You can make their job harder, but that's about it. They have the resources to get to you if they want to. Ukrainian script kiddies don't. So make technical countermeasures against the thieves, and political ones against the NSA.

That was my point, actually.

Oklahoma is a very oil-friendly state. We're not about to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs until our houses all fall down.

Hopefully those studies can keep others from falling in the same hole we are here. As for us, forget about us, we'll be pumping until there's nothing there but rock.

First off: spreading FUD? Watch that knee, it's jerking a bit there.

I can't find the story on slashdot (admittedly, I didn't try all too hard), but a quick google search found the name of the facility and the wikipedia article. It's the Rocky Flats Plant about 15 miles from Denver. There are pretty little graphs showing where plutonium was found.

It's old news - I don't remember what the slashdot story was about off the top of my head.

My point is that this sort of thing isn't acceptable for commercial entities, and it shouldn't be acceptable for the government. I'm all behind a lot of special exceptions the government gets - like military vehicles not having to be compliant with safety laws - but things like nuclear safety should apply to everyone. Best practices are there for a reason.

I was mostly talking about the fallout. You notice Pripyat hasn't been rebuilt.

Had the fallout been a lot worse, Nagasaki and Hiroshima would have been cordoned off.

I'm actually surprised they rebuilt, honestly. There are large parts of Okinawa where nothing gets built. I was under the understanding that it's a religious thing - they believe that the spirits of the dead from the battle there still occupy those sites, and building there would upset them. Okinawa tends to be cane fields, urban sprawl, and wilderness. A lot of people died at the two bomb sites, so you think they'd have abandoned them.

(Disclaimer: I lived in Japan, but do not claim to be an expert in their religion)

"Bomb the Blogosphere was a t-shirt worn by Martin Reed in the comic Questionable Content.

Not sure if xkcd ever talked about bombing the blogosphere.

There are fault lines in Oklahoma. There's a fairly large one that runs down from Nebraska into the eastern part of the state. It's usually pretty quiet, but every now and again you get a shift.

And the article said that they're updating fault maps - they don't have enough data.

So... are we sure these are caused by fracking? 'Cause even if you are, you'll never get Oklahomans (especially the government) to believe it.

After all, we're the state that gave you Sen. Inhofe, who still denies that climate change is happening at all (sorry about that, I didn't vote for him). We've got a lot of people employed in the Oil industry. Going against Oil here is political suicide.

Hopefully we can provide scientists enough data to prove what's going on (if it is indeed manmade) so they can use the data elsewhere. They'll make no traction here.

Just guessing here:

They want to remind the current politicians and the people that vote for them that nuclear testing isn't OK.

And probably that the US needs to take more concern about the environment, especially the military. Remember the story a few weeks back about how the background radiation in Denver is considerably higher than normal due to poor practices at an upwind nuclear weapon factory? That kind of crap is unacceptable.

(I'm not an anti-bomb guy or an anti-nuclear guy , but I do think the government needs to be a bit more careful with their impact on the environment, since that's where its citizens live. I'm not upset about trinity though - special circumstances and whatnot.)

It's small compared to other tests. It's only large compared to Hiroshima.

You'll note that Nagasaki and Hiroshima are still there. If we dropped, say, a 50 megaton bomb on them, they wouldn't be.

I'm not entirely sure that the amount of radioactive fallout is directly proportional to the size of the bomb, though.

He's talking about social conservatives, who want life to return to a non-existent "golden age" when men did what Jesus said if they didn't want to go to hell and women did what they were told if they didn't want to run into another door.

They tend to coincide with a lot of rich industrialists, who believe we should go back to a simpler time when they could shoot union leaders and not have to worry about silly things like safety or disability insurance, or paying actual money to the workers.

Personally, I'd say he probably means 150 years rather than 300. 300 years ago, the north was full of religious extremists and in the south you were either a slave-owning plantation worker or a nobody.