not bore them to death trying all night to set up their mounts.

It took me about 15 minutes to polar align my first ever telescope, on it's first night after delivery. It's not rocket science, and it's not as difficult as you seem to think.

I will admit that the manual was pretty decent on this point, and I'm the sort of person who Rs T F-ing M before unpacking anything else. which isn't a normal 11-year-old's natural trait. But so what? On the first night, you set up the scope and get them hooked. First night is for seeing sights. If that works, then there will be other nights for them to learn the hobby. If the first night doesn't show enough goodies, then there won't be a second night.

Maybe so, but even under the US Fair Use doctrine

Irrelevant. The BBC is not governed by American law. (Hint : look at what the first "B" stands for.)

Actual growth of a reserve is much much rarer and much slower. It takes millions of years to cook a source rock and generate hydrocarbons ; it takes more millions of years for the hydrocarbons to migrate from source into a reservoir. Most ore deposits also take extended periods of time to form, with consequent slow absolute production rates.

When oil prices were rising (a joyful period - it's around 10 times the price now compared to when I entered the industry), there was a bunch of economists who'd make a lot of ill-informed comments about how the rising prices meant there was literally (not figuratively) an infinite supply of oil available. Which goes to show how delusional some economics professors can be. Some of these people really do need to go out and take a hammer to a lump of granite for an afternoon - it's both educational and therapeutic.

You may remember some kerfuffle a few years back with several oil companies admitting to 30 to 50% decreases in their predictions of production and reserves? Within the industry, that was viewed as a perfectly reasonable admission of the inherent uncertainties of the original predictions.

I honestly doubt that other extractive industries will have better resource estimates. Particularly when you get into Rumsfeldian known-knowns, unknown-knowns and unknown-unknowns. Which is where a lot of reserve and resource predictions lay.

agenda is to shift money to untaxable locations and hide it (I thought that was EVERYONE's agenda),

If that's really your attitude then you must be some sort of right-wing tax-avoiding nut job.

American? That would explain it!

In addition to being illegal, [in-]effective[,] not soluble is water, and would not make hydrocarbons more mobile or more soluble. It would however, readily dissolve in hydrocarbon fluids, where it would be difficult and expensive to separate.

These are valid general objections. I'll add a genuine question from someone with 30 years experience in drilling oil wells - what the fuck would you expect it to do?

The only time I've seen carbon tetrachloride used on an oil rig (with the possible exception of in HVAC systems, which I just use but don't have to maintain or care about their details, and which might contain CCL4) is as a laboratory reagent for separating different densities of liquid hydrocarbons. Which is something you don't really need to do at the rig site (why would you want 10 different tankers or pipelines when you can just run one to the storage farm and on to the refinery after blending). Separating gaseous and liquid hydrocarbons is routinely done (strangely, in the so-called "separator" ; doh!), but just using simple physical properties ; separating out solids ("waxes") is also needed in some low-temperature fields to prevent "waxes" accumulating in pipes, tanks, etc. But again, you don't need CCl4 for that either.

I can't think of a reason to use anything more than traces of CCl4 on a drilling rig. Even for the lab uses we've replaced it with propan-2-ol or acetone.

about half a day of average power consumption in used battery storage. So, while we probably don't need that much storage it may be considered so inexpensive that we'll use it all.

Is there enough lithium in the world for that?

No, seriously? Is there enough lithium at a high enough concentration in ore minerals (e.g. spodumene, or other primary lithium sources), to make that quantity of batteries? Or would you need to depend on more esoteric accumulator cell chemistries such as the magnesium-based ones promised for the last decade or so?

How did that turn out? Did you get that house painted white again?

White man's immigration to America - and their genocides of the inhabitants - started well over 3 centuries ago, in large part as a colony for transportation of criminals and other undesirables. By two centuries ago the hecatomb of the native inhabitants was well under way using germs, steel and guns in approximately that order of importance. Though that's not the origin myth that your educational machines in Hollywood put out.

A bunch of relays (or pneumatic or hydraulic values for that matter) is not self-concious, and no amount of them however interconnected will become conscious, self-aware, or have feelings.

There's no reason to believe that's true.

Yet he states it as if true with the unshaking certainty that is normally associated with the raving lunatic (who has stopped taking their prescription drugs) or the religious. not that there is much perceivable difference between the tow groups.

I'm hoping my lunatic friend stops taking his medications again. When he's rational and dosed-up we both want to use his deranged ravings to found a religion and make us lots of money. Worked for Hubbard ; worked for Joe Random Swami ; worked for Sun Yun Moon ; worked for Moses ; no reason it shouldn't work for us too. You can sell the same claptrap repeatedly. just keep your sucker lists from one religion to the next.

Now it's ancient alien swamp logging transgender pawn shop owners.

FTFY

In fact it's looking very like the Apple connection is solely intended as a viral marketing stunt. Apple vendors are piggybacking a mundane murder trial with their astroturf in order to sell more iPhones.

So, let me get this right. This story (fabrication, whatever) implies that Apple users are so fucking retarded as to do something like this, and that Apple VENDORS are using this demonstration of the retardedness of Apple USERS to sell more Apple stuff to those same Apple USERS.

Now, I've never liked Apple stuff after owning one for a couple of years. But I know that the guy who sold that Apple iWhatever to me (at a good price ; trying for a conversion!) wasn't a retard - I still work with him. So I think this story probably reflects worst on Apple salesmen. I could believe it of them.

If it's in a separate form factor, then you could wear them under a motorbike helmet

Not a motor bike rider myself. On the push bike, I don't bother with a helmet because I prefer full environmental awareness (and after 40 years on a bike, I ain't dead yet), though I could conceive of mountain biking situations where I'd wear one (if I did those thinks ; unlikely, as I don't like the mess mountain bikes make of high upland soils). when ice or rock climbing, I'll wear a helmet if I consider the rockfall hazard sufficient. And when caving, I need somewhere to clip my lamp(s), so I'm always wearing one. In short, neither a helmet-Nazi, nor a helmet-phobe.

But I'd be very, very careful of mounting hard objects inside a helmet - particularly in close proximity to the skull. I've seen the blood pissing out of someone's forehead because they put a lamp-mounting clip's bolt in bass-ackwards, and it ain't a pretty sight.

That's not saying that it can't be done - just that making it detachable for moving between helmets is going to require a lot of attention. I'd start by looking at fitting it around the jaw-line and cheek roots, for example. Smash them and you may well not suffer long term effects (apart from a smashed face), but do the same damage to your brain pan and you're likely to be ...

Any recent news on Schumacher? The last I heard was in mid-June and "slow progress".

But really, who's going to hack your fridge?

Someone who puts a network cable into it.

No, I'm not going to give the fridge a password into my wifi. Why should I? And I'm certainly not going to pay for a cellphone service for it.