[Hat's off to the non-Norwegian Slashdottirs who get the joke.]

The question of the day, how long till someone links imaging processing software with the guidance system so they can get the drones to hover over, and follow along, as sharks patrol off shore?

And the question of the day before - or at least, the question of the feasibility phase of the programme - is : is swimming at shallow depth a sufficiently common pre-hunting behaviour amongst all types of dangerous sharks in this particular area, that the behaviour is a sufficiently good predictor of attack to be worth the effort.

Or, to generalise it further (because this is not a new discussion), what is the false positive rate (beach alarms blaring "get out of the water", tourists scared and not returning, businesses going bust, but no subsequent attack even amongst the remaining vulnerable population) compared to the false negative rate ("is that a shark, or just ... nah, it's just seaweed" - or electronic version - no alarm, chewed tourist) for this screening test? And yes, I am deliberately using terms comparable to testing medical screens, because this is not a new debate.

While I'm not a shark behaviour specialist, as a scuba diver who first entered the sea in the years when Jaws was still a fresh movie, I have paid a little attention to the subject. Some shark species cruise just below the surface and are highly visible to detection like this. And some don't. Indeed, some individuals of some species would be detectable like this one morning, and change hunting strategies ten minutes later.

The idea has merit - don't get me wrong - but that doesn't mean that it will actually work well enough to be worth the effort on it;s own. Possibly as an adjunct to a "lifeguard drone" service looking for people in trouble in the water, pollution, fights on the beach, etc, it could be justified. But for just this one task - I doubt it would be worth the effort.

There is a good argument to be made that the oceans are the shark's territory, and us humans should be a damned sight more respectful of their right to life liberty and the pursuit of black seal-shaped food. I don't consider the seas to be my own, and I probably spend more time working on them than most people here. Next month my transport to work is likely to change to the extent that I'll need to worry about dying of shark attack instead of hypothermia, if the transport crashes. Concentrates the mind wonderfully, the thought of dying on the way to work.

then I guess you're fine with the price of a reasonable laptop suddenly skyrocketing from $500 to $2,500 on grounds that

That would only work if it applied to ALL laptop vendors. For my personal needs (I'm considering the possibility that I MAY need a laptop with a better-than-SVGA graphics card with some sort of "hardware acceleration". But since I've never knowingly used such, I've still very vague on what that means - is it newer than 2000, or newer than 2005?), second (or third, or fifth) user remains perfectly fine and runs an awful lot cheaper than buying new.

On that basis, I see the "EFI/ UEFI boot problem" as being something that I may have to deal with the other side of 2020. When my next laptop may be feeling it's age.

I guess that the "Damon Knight Grand Master Award" is some sort of lifetime achievement award. [Googles]

[It] is a lifetime honor presented annually by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to no more than one living writer of fantasy or science fiction. It was inaugurated in 1975 when Robert Heinlein was made the first SFWA Grand Master and it was renamed in 2002 after the Association's founder, Damon Knight, who had died that year.

OK, fair enough. I read his most recent, "Bowl of Heaven" and thought "I've read this before. Several times." It's a fair enough book of the form, but it's hardly ground-breaking. Given that it came out of Niven and Benford, I was somewhat disappointed, and hadn't decided whether to get the second part.

It may be time to upgrade your garage door opener

This time I'll get a model with better suction, three holes and a more understanding attitude.

Eventually, as the comet erodes, then both parts of the spacecraft would end up in orbit, but within the (mildly unpredictable) envelope of the comet's other natural ejecta, which doesn't really add to the space-debris problem. Though where the launch cowlings etc go, I've no-idea. One would hope for re-entry, but the mission design may not have included that at build time.

But every "picture" suggests things rotate about them in an accretion disk. Which doesn't make sense if they were all pulled in from different directions

It makes perfect sense when material isn't uniformly present in all directions, as in the case when a black hole pulls matter from an orbiting star.

... or from any other source where it has an inherent angular momentum, or has AM by the relative position of the accretion disc's matter source and the barycentre of the black hole.

The final shape of the accretion disc is then going to be a complex composite of the original matter's AM, and any torque imposed on it by the gravitational asymmetries in the region around the black hole. I don't have the maths to describe it, but that has been the empirical description for several decades - possibly up to 4 decades.

the article is light on facts, but because it's misleading about the fact that it is uninformative (and only about pretty pictures), and it presents itself as tackling questions which it does not.

.... which is exactly what I've come to expect from anything from "StartsWithABang", and particularly things where she only cites a "medium.com" source.

I'm trying to figure out a way of editing out her posts from my Slashdot headline feed. Any ideas?

[to be fair - she also has a post up which links to a couple of other sources which are not medium. Which ameliorates my standing suspiscion that they're an account owned by Medium.com's advertising agency. Slightly ameliorates.]

You obviously have not ever worked with the oil and gas industry :) There may very well be thousands of families dying from poisoned water, but the oil and gas industry will scuff it off as a non-issue, just like always

The oil industry will only pay attention to problems for unimportant people, such as "foreigners".

Of course, that includes most posters here, since I don't see many Russians of Gulf (Persian) Coasters posting.

When Odysseus met his ghost in Hades later, Achilles the Dead thought that Achilles the Living had been a dickhead for thinking that.

it obviously does not need considerable earth moving equipment to gain access.

It's not the gaining access that's the problem. It's the surviving the deceleration at the bottom, and getting out again.