We shouldn't have to design things to prevent this kind of act.

That's debatable. But in the real world you do have to design against the random mis-placed back-hoe bucket, a truck going off the road and hitting a relay cabinet, a sperm whale attempting to mate with your undersea cable and good old lightning strikes. Which are sufficiently random that protecting around - or designing around - random damage is still pretty much necessary.

I suspect that there has been insufficient paranoia in the people choosing the topology and physical layout of the cables. Putting all of your 100% redundancy in the same cable bundle doesn't give you redundancy against gross damage to that bundle, whereas running 50% of your capacity in a bundle down Main Street and 50% in a bundle going down Cross Boulevard provides service level protection up to events that take out both Main Street and Cross Boulevard. But that does increase your cabling installation, maintenance and repair costs appreciably, so I understand why PHBs do the Wrong Thing, even if their Dilberts tell them what the Right Thing is.

"Tap to click" on a touchpad is one of the stupidest things ever invented.

I think it's really well designed, and excellent at achieving it's purpose.

It's purpose is, of course, to really fuck up any users who are not touch typists intent on RSI, and any users who are touch typists by forcing them to take their hands off the keyboard.

Me? I carry a mouse. For the work's laptop. And a mouse for the client's laptop. And a good, left-handed mouse for my laptop stays in my locker when I'm not on the boat. And there's a spare mouse in the locker too. Beats using a touch pad. Using a clit-stick beats using a touch pad. Using a keyboard accelerator beats using any of the above, but most applications seem to be working hard to make that impossible these days.

. the first point being that this is an internet chat forum and a certain amount of latitude is expected in this context

Wrong.

read what the site's sub-title is : News for Nerds.

I don't see any reason to lower the expectations I've placed on other users for the last 17 or so years (I've forgotten when I signed up. I know I was still on dial-up ; Slashdot was one of the things that persuaded me to get an automatic dial up account instead of manually dialling up). If you're a nerd (which you self-identify as, because you're here) then you should be able to handle a level of technical discussion far higher than the jock in the stadium.

Nonetheless you do seem to have some severely distant-from-reality ideas about the biology of corals. That's a general point. Perhaps you'd like to explain how long it takes a coral to die due to increasing water temperatures, and then reflect on what windows that leaves for remedial work? In general of course. The impression you give (obtained by, uh, reading your words ; I may be under the misapprehension that you chose your words with more consideration than a "normal" person. Because you're, like, generally here, man.) is that you think that it is an instantaneous reaction, for all corals in an area in a very short period of time?

In general, how long do you think it would take a new coral growth to spread from a thermally resistant survivor to at least partly replace the corals lost in a bleaching event? It's quite an important question because, in general, it affects things like shore line stability for considerable areas, and so affects how much expenditure will be needed for protecting harbours, approach channels etc for shipping?

Just to put things into context - the last time that the planet had this level of ocean acidification and greenhouse gas dumping, it was done over a period of about (+/- 50%) 6 thousand years (compared to the couple of hundred years that we've done it), and it took about 120 thousand years (compared to the 10 thousand years we've had agriculture) for the effects to be absorbed back to something approaching normality. That's one of the reasons that it's geological marks are a useful signpost. The question is less one of whether or not corals will survive, but more of whether human civilisation will survive to ask the question of the corals.

Using the wrong word for the wrong concept is a tactic that Humpty Dumpty discussed in 1870-odd. It's reputation hasn't improved.

... that's more than a little pedantic.

If you want a scientific discussion, then get used to pedantry, and saying precisely what you mean using precisely the technical terminology of the field, unless you want people to think that you mean what you say, instead of what you mean.

For example, you say Change the temperate of the water? Coral dies. / Touch the coral? The coral dies. / Change the ocean chemistry in anyway? The coral dies. I suspect that you mean "Change the temperature of the water too much and too fast and the coral dies" (and appropriate other changes). Because if that isn't what you meant, then you are implying that every single day then every coral on the planet dies as the thermonuclear radiation of the rising Sun sears the water. (The deep water corals would die on a less predictable time scale. I see about 0.16 centigrade variation on the well I'm just writing reports on, though that's isolated from the global deep water circulation. But that's an easily measurable change, which you imply is fatal. If only the seabed wasn't lethal, so that there could be corals to die.)

You seem to be thinking that all species of corals are interchangeable. Which I find incredible, having to spend some parts of my working life writing reports on corals at the bottom of the North Atlantic (well, 2km below surface ; below the photic zone by over a km, and in water temperatures of 1-2 centigrade) and other parts of my life monitoring for contamination of coral reefs in the intertidal zone and 25-30 centigrade water. Somehow, I don't think that one of those species is going to be able to colonise an empty niche left by the other.

Rate of change is very important. The global temperature rise in the Lower Cretaceous didn't lead to a significant extinction event. That temperature change took place over several millions of years. A similar magnitude of temperature change in the Late Eocene (the PETM "blast in the past" as we call it at work, using it as a geosteering datum) took place over about 6000 years and led to one of the largest mass extinctions outside the "big five".

The effect of humans on the seas is significant, important, and growing. But personally, I'm slightly more concerned about the pH changes than the temperature changes. Not because I think corals are robust to temperature changes, but because the symbiont algae are probably more amenable to rapid evolution (human directed, if necessary) and experimental recharge of the corals. Which is work-in-progress. But that won't be by the sort of mechanisms that you seem to think will happen.

Vacuum is pretty nasty.

Pressure differentials do nasty things to seals. Particularly with nasty chemicals around.

Getting the floating level correct may give a reasonable environment. Multiple floatation bags - hydrogen being OK in an oxygen-free atmosphere - provide plenty of redundancy. It'd be fun trying to land the first few rockets to start building the base.

Occupy the base with a plant (machine, or biological) that turns CO2 + water into carbon dust and plastics construction material, and that you can von Neumann your way to habitability in a relatively short period of time.

Terraforming Venus has always struck me as being a more approachable tactic than terraforming Mars. The big question would be - is there enough water? And with 90-odd bar of atmosphere to work with, you can throw dirty snowballs at it with the fair expectation that they'll not blow back into space.

Normally referring to "we" is an attempt at being inclusive. But StartsWithABang Starts With A Fizzle by linking to his (presumed) employer, medium.com. about some old news.

Terraforming Venus may be no easier than terraforming Mars. Both are probably practically impossible, given that adapting human technologies to subsist on either planet will probably involve less tech than allowing humans to live on either planet. We'd still get the large majority of our living area from the asteriods.

But recycling a toner cartridge ... well, my one is on about it's 4th or 5th refill since I brought the printer in ... 2003. When I print, it does get a bit streaky now, so I do get the feeling I need to buy a new cassette thingy. It's an LJ-2 or LJ-3 compatible, so I should be able to get a replacement.

What's the normal lifetime for printers these decades?

I still haven't opened the second bottle from the refill kit. Does this stuff have a shelf life, and if so, why?

Once the case is settled, will the lawyers be humanely euthanised? For the betterment of humanity.

Does "Goo Gone" work at -35degC ?

Serious question : most commercial aircraft spend most of their moving time at many kilometres high and many centigrade below zero. Products that work at near zero (degC) may simply not work under these circumstances.

To a first approximation, drag varies as the square of the speed difference, and the speed difference is going to be greatest at cruising/ working altitude, not when taxi-ing around at STP.

(Yes, it's a first approximation. When I was learning practical turbulence, I was advised to start searching for approximate coefficients by analysing my data set using drag = constant * flow^1.86 ; in theory it should be ^2, but the difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference, and in practice, there is.)

But its a species

Anyone who can refer to "coral" as a species clearly has such a strong grasp on biology as to not be worth paying attention to.

I'm not a biologist in any significant form, but I didn't spend a large chunk of a year learning to identify different classes and genera of coral as fossils (for dating the rocks in which their fossils are found) without getting the message that there have been many, many different species of coral. And I didn't get horrible sunburn the first time I snorkelled on a coral reef without realising that "coral" covers a LARGE amount of diversity. And so far we're only talking about morpho-species, which for-sure are a much coarser division of sessile framework forming Cnidarians than they use themselves. (Corals, if they think, probably don't differentiate much betweens any temporarily-marine vertebrates.)

Google's job is to index the context of web pages.

Not true. Google's job is to make money for it's shareholders, which it does by serving targeted (and therefore, hopefully, relevant) adverts to web users. And it achieves that result by having a very large collection of information about it's users. And it achieves that by being a very popular search engine, which attracts a lot of users. And it became a very popular search engine by having a wide-ranging spider and a good relevance matcher (PigeonRank, IIRC). Being an indexer of web pages is very important to Google, I agree. But it is a very long way from being a core aim (let alone a "duty") of the company.

In terms of achieving business aims, Google's acquisition of information about it's customers by releasing Android, populated with Google apps, may already be returning more of that advertising revenue then the search engine. I can envisage the day that Google decides (on a good business case) stops providing search.

Or sooner, Google stops providing search to non-registered users.

Specifically designed low-altitude parachutes are effective at a few hundred feet. No, it won't save you at extreme low altitudes and velocities, but it's certainly better than nothing.

To quote a friend describing the first of the micro-nuts (rock climbing protection equipment), "they might not stop you, but they'll sure as hell slow you down!".

With strengths (breaking loads) from 2 to 6 kN, you don't need to fall very far for a nicro-nut to pull. But in doing so, it absorbs a considerable amount of energy. And the next one does too. It's not nice, but it really does slow you down.

HughPickens.com writes:
Reasons
Mystery solved.

Noooooooo ! ! ! ! And I thought that Google were the last remaining bastion of making major business decisions on the grounds of a Tarot hand.

What is the world coming to? What did that bastard Democritus start? We should never have banged those rocks together!

Well that'll be the whole maize/ Indian Corn industry out of the window. It may have been over a thousand years ago, but some early gene engineer managed to cross-breed at least three separate species of plant to generate the hexaploid entity that is modern Indian Corn.

What do you mean - that's not artificial? But humans did it, not Mother Nature.

I wonder if these almonds have a low enough amount of natural cyanide to be safe to eat? Well it'll be OK, because Mother Nature's cyanide doesn't kill you as badly as artificial cyanide.

Right general idea, but you put the spike in the centre of the steering wheel, requiring pressure from the driver's chest to keep the ignition enabled. Dead drivers don't kill pedestrians.