The article discusses health care as the main industry that's important to have 24hr information connection, and by utilizing mobile devices that information and connectivity can be available 24/7. This is then generalized, saying because it works there all companies should utilize this opportunity to get a high ROI on employee efficiency. While we've all seen these posts before, what other industries require 24 hr access from all employees? I know managers and the like in most all businesses often are required to be on-call, but this seems to be addressing the lesser employees, as in the manager contacts his/her subordinate, making the subordinate more or less be on-call. Does anyone have such circumstances (besides power plants/industry and manufacturing)? Is it often outlined in your contracts?

A bit of an incomplete thought here, but I wonder about the possibilities of utilizing these plumes as a source for raw materials for polymers. The one word "plastics" is still as important today as it has been for the past 70 years. Bioplastics is coming along well but why not use what's coming out of the earth at a rapid rate? The purity would certainly be of concern, and any sulfur may result in catalyst poisoning, but I wonder if there may be a benefit towards collection and purification? There's research out of UC Davis ( http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/04/04/1014804108 ) identifying getting high enough pressures and temperatures (though ~50 Gpa ) we can get some more complex hydrocarbons. Not to burn off, but to make polymer materials. Utilizing the gas as a source of energy for this process would be useful, but definitely trying to think of ways around burning such useful material. Of course it would be cost effective to do it near the source, and I doubt anyone wants Union Carbide on the arctic landscape, but this is just something I was thinking about. Cost to benefit ratios will probably prove me wrong though.

That's the first image that immediately came to mind when I saw this picture. Not the awesomeness of the universe, but someone's bum. Tragic.

Could this then be considered a MoS-COS-MOS?

Maybe we'll find David Brin's creatures wandering about.

I don't enjoy how he identifies 9 notes for a scale (or identifies it as a rule.) 9 chords to identify the numbers and leaving 0 as a rest, it's an ok interpretation, but I hope there's something better out there. The whole thing sounds and looks like a "made on a Mac" hipster nonsense.

Have you read "The Wanderer" by Fritz Leiber? Might be a good start.

DON'T APNIC! Incredibly lame, I know...