The whole point of the article is they're optimistic about extracting enough samples to get the complete DNA, so that's a non-issue.

You phrased that to be inflammatory, while ignoring the realities of the situation. Elephants in zoos aren't subjected to some ridiculously invasive regimen and a mammoth wouldn't be either. They are very large, very powerful animals. You don't casually stick a needle into one of them. Invasive testing is something you keep to a minimum, because the animal is in a position to object when it's conscious, and sedating it is difficult and dangerous. So the "endless barrage" in question means a whole lot of stool and urine samples, and not so much with the vivisection.

One hopes they would make more than one. And if they don't, the question becomes, how accepting of visibly different but roughly the right shape members is an elephant herd? If the answer is "accepting", then that's no problem. (And I'm curious to know the answer to that question.)

Either you're underestimating the power of motherly love, and she will accept her offspring regardless of its appearance, or you overestimate the attachment elephants have for their offspring, and she will reject an apparently "defective" offspring without trauma. I suspect she would accept her offspring. Baby elephants are actually quite hairy, as babies go, and get less hairy as they get older. If instead her baby gets furry, I don't think she'll object. As for health/safety, she'd be the best cared for pregnant elephant in history.

This strikes me as one of those experiments that falls into the category of "we don't know; let's try it and find out." Is it real, valuable science? We have no idea. We might learn any number of things about genetics, gestation, fetal development, and a raft of other complicated biological things. Or we might learn nothing much. We won't know until we try it. I suspect developing elephant ultrasound will be useful elsewhere, if nothing else. Somebody will learn something, even if it's just engineering.

And the Latin was both spelled correctly and used correctly. Increasingly rare, anywhere in the world, where people write "edcetera" and think they're being clever.

I'm sure high coca content chocolate is very nice. You'll get quite a high off of it.

For future reference, coca != cocoa. Yes they are both tropical plants, but the reasons human cultivate each of them are very different. Coca leaves are the source of cocaine. Cocoa beans are the source of chocolate. That was an amusing typo.

Yes, it is. Unregulated last mile wiring looks like this. It's a "natural monopoly" because the alternative is a dangerous, unmaintainable eyesore.

Yes, I know, a happy medium is at least theoretically possible, but in practice it's still subject to human nature. The correct solution is for the city to install full height concrete cable tunnels everywhere, with trays along the walls, and lease out space in the trays to all comers, including power companies. But despite the fact that humans will always want utilities (that's why they're called utilities), that idea is just too scarily expensive outside of big cities. Which makes no sense, because it's not like the tunnels would ever fall out of use. But humans are humans, and infrastructure with century long payoff periods is intolerable.

Meanwhile the more likely alternative, that of burying multiple cable runs in independent conduits, is still subject to human nature. Competitors having "accidents" with backhoes being the primary example.

So the best solution from a cost and reliability standpoint is to treat it like a natural monopoly. One organization to run fiber everywhere. If you're allergic to that being something called a government, make it a co-op instead. My power company is a co-op, and it works beautifully. I get cleaner, more reliable power than people who are subject to the tyranny of the for-profit power company, at 1/3rd the price, and I can go to the annual meeting and vote for the board of directors. I'd rather have voting control of that organization rather than it be a profit center, be it a government or a co-op.

We've tried it the for-profit way. It has served us very poorly. It's time to try another way.

Where I live, the public transportation infrastructure managers are so good, they proactively solve problems with the roads while they're still developing, instead of waiting around for a failure or serious damage to accumulate.

For instance, they've spent the past several years converting a stretch of road with grade access into a limited access highway. This required putting in a slew of new bridges (which have been done for some time now). The new bridge I use every day started to suffer subsistence adjacent to it, so the road leading onto the bridge began to sag below the bridge deck. Little by little it got lower and lower, over the course of about two months, until it was a noticeable bump when you drove onto the bridge. The various road agencies closed the lane one night, drilled some holes through the pavement, and injected high pressure concrete, raising the road back up to the level of the bridge deck. Done in a night and once again the transition is bump-free. Found and fixed before traffic hitting that edge of the bridge caused damage to the bridge itself.

Together with things like total replacement of a 50 year old 5 lane highway bridge in a single year, new pavement resurfacing regularly, and a regular rotating schedule of whole new pavement sections in subdivisions (housing subdivisions here build their own roads, then turn them over to county ownership, instead of maintaining them privately), and divider fences down the middle of every interstate highway, this state has proven to me over the course of the past two decades that it is still possible for government to work, especially at doing the number one most important thing for government to do since the beginning of civilization: roads.

If your state is failing, you need a better one. Do something about it. It's not inevitable.

Oh, I know this game. Because of the porn, right?

If you take it sufficiently literally (as Slashdot is so very good at doing), that means you can keep anything you can carry. You have to be able to bear the arms you keep. So no SAMs, no tanks, and no three man crewed machine guns.

Oh yeah, it's independent. The chairman is the brother-in-law of the police chief, the treasurer is the sister of a desk sergeant, and the secretary who keeps the minutes? That's Bubba. He's a functional illiterate.

You just set that there piece of paper in that inbox right there and we'll get back to you. Don't mind the dust.

No it didn't. Copyright originated as a monopoly granted to publishers to prevent other publishers from horning in on their action. From the very beginning, the actual authors were given short shrift indeed.

I'd really rather not. <shudder>

Or perhaps you were referring to the possibility for reducing crime again?

Boom. No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow.

Looks like you hit a nerve. I think it was meant to be funny, but it was a little raw.

You listed one changed climate (Fertile Crescent->desert) and 5 weather events. And snarked about Ethiopia, which still has the same climate today that it did in the '70s, but still has loads of political issues that causes their food problems.

Benghal's population didn't recover in ten years, but Benghal's climate didn't change in 1770. Droughts that kill millions, of any species, are invariably weather, or the population that died wouldn't have existed in the first place, for lack of habitat.

In other words, you're not making a very convincing case.

Worse, the examples of both the destruction of the Fertile Crescent and the region which is now the Sahara Desert are examples of purely regional climate change brought on by overgrazing of destructive domestic species. The climate did change, but the cause was quite overt and the effects were not global. So your case is even flimsier.

Maybe history actually doesn't contain any examples of global climate change causing long term economic damage to humans. Humans as a species aren't old enough to have encountered that scale of disruption. Regional, sure. Volcanoes raising new islands (which disrupt ocean currents), massive species invasions (human-facilitated or otherwise), catastrophic flooding (the formation of the Black Sea), all have seriously disrupted regional climates. None of those things affect the global climate. The only major global climate change the human species has lived through was the onset and retreat of the most recent Ice Age, and humans were a footnote as far as their affects on the world during that time. Certainly it had little affect on the human economy. Stone Age economies don't amount to much.

Please confine yourself to references to the title of that book. Quotes from the text invariably give me the creeps.

Fuck I hate that book. I wish I'd never read it.