>Again: the NRA is a religion and does not represent the desires of the majority of its adherents.

I agree - they dont really represent our interests very well. They are far too moderate and willing to compromise.
We need to eradiacate all gun laws of any kind form the books, and restore the 2A to its original intention, and the NRA
just isnt pushing hard enough. This is why we have additional groups such as GOA and the VCDL, because the NRA
is too goddamn liberal.

I feel like a survivalist stating this, but I think it is good to teach kids some skills that are not dependent on electricity, if only how not to be completely helpless during a power outage or a disaster:

One example is basic usage and care of a generator. It is surprising how few people don't get that there is a difference between a Harbor Freight special (which is an ET800 clone of a Yamaha model made in the early 19702), versus a Honda, Yamaha, or other quality generator with an inverter (or at the minimum active voltage regulation) that puts out clean power.

Another example, something simple as planting a garden or raising chickens. Skills that may not be needed all the time, but if something does happen, are worth having.

Using current traditional soil methods, one acre of fodder grass will require 100,000 gallons of water. Most of this water is lost via transpiration of the plant and evaporation from the soil.
I can build you a 1/8 acre building, load it up with recirculating vertical-stacked NFT channels, and you could produce that same acre of grass using 1,000 gallons of water.

That would be say 10,000lbs, 4.5 tons of grass. Not a great yield for an acre, but not a disastrously bad one either.

So the 1000 gallons of water cycles through the hydroponic system around 100 times as it is gradually absorbed by the plants. Each time it is picked up by the plants and transpired (moving nutrients around in the plant in the process), it then gets re-captured from the atmosphere, re-condensed and pumped back into the hydroponics system.

We bought a lemon tree, then we were told we had to destroy it because it wasn't licensed.

This implies that you brought a ready-grown tree. Maybe only a few kilos, but that still takes a year or so to achieve, so they're relatively expensive. (This reminds me to water the 2m tall lemon tree sitting in the living room window, which we started from a seed in 2006. With pot and soil, it's over 30kilos.)

It just wanted to self-replicate and make us free food.

This, on the other hand, implies that you grew the tree from seed, or from a cutting of an original tree. The seed is one case, and is one of the reasons that plant breeders try to develop seedless versions of fruit, or ones with a very low germination rate. The propagation from cuttings though is much easier to contain, because you need access to the tree, not the fruit.

I was at the garden centre with the wife this afternoon. Many of the plant cultivars which the wife wanted to buy carried notices barring the buyer from propagating them without getting the prior written permission of the rights holding company. Buying those would have constituted accepting the terms of the contract, so I steered the wife to other cultivars from other suppliers which didn't carry such warnings.

I suspect that you brought a lemon tree from somewhere, and in the process agreed to a similar "no propagation" contract (did you actually read the terms of the contract that you entered into?) ; then you propagated the lemon tree to produce a clone (yes, a "clone", in the sense of "clone"). In doing so, you violated the terms of the contract you'd entered into with the selling company. And they complained to appropriate authorities ,who forced you to comply with the terms of the contract into which you'd entered.

(Your local laws and contract law may differ. But I suspect there's something along those lines happening. It's possible you did it from a seed, and the laws you have are even more restrictive than we have to deal with here. If your contract law allows you to be held to the terms of a contract that you're not shown ... it'll be almost like software sales.)

This is the theory of abiogenesis

It is one of several theories of abiogenesis, which are all under consideration by researchers.

Sounds like NASA finally discovered Maxwell's Demon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Nope, just an exciting 1980s proposal for one way in which significant parts of life's metabolism could plausibly have developed from an inorganic system into an organic one. There's nothing new about this article - OOL people have been discussing this since the detection of sub-surface water on Europa, and the basic research (Mike Russell's) was done in the 1980s based on theoretical work in the 1970s by Gunter Wachtershauser. None of which violates Maxwell's laws of thermodynamics, because they don't take place in closed systems.

Dr. Nick Lane has a more extended discussion on the possibility of life originating due to naturally-occurring proton imbalances in his book "Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life".

... which was published a number of years ago. My copy has been on my bookshelf for at least 3 years, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't news when it came out.

The basic ideas that are presented here are not new (this isn't to diss Nick Lane - he's done some very interesting work, and written some good popular science books and articles). As the actual article (but not TFS) says, the basic idea of life developing from flow of alkaline hydrothermal fluids through pyrite deposits comes from Mike Russell in the early 1980s (and that develops work from Gunter Wachtershauser in the 1970s).

One of the more attractive features of this theory is that it allows incremental conversion of an inorganic chemical system into an organic one which fixes carbon dioxide into organic molecules. It would also explain the presence of iron-sulphur molecular groups in the cores of many important enzymes. It is one of the lead contenders in OOL discussions. But it's probably not the final answer.

OMFG. You frigging yankees can't even RTFA.

"OMG! ZOMG! gov't taking our freedoms!!! this must stop now!!!!!"

Let me help those of you who are not yet blind with rage, by quoting the RTFA:

It's not targeted on breweries specifically. It is targeted at diary farms. It is about accountability what the cows are fed with. Breweries inserted themselves into the market and, as suppliers, are subject to regulations.

It's much simpler, actually.

1. Samsung released Gear, based on Android. Major complain: miserable battery life.

2. Samsung released Gear 2, based on Tizen to address the major complains, battery life among them.

3. Google warms up to wearables while at the same time upset about Samsung diverging (and not only on werables). They approach Samsung and pressure them to go back to the official Android way of doing things. Thus, potentially, next Gear might be based on the Android again.

Haven't worked for Samsung myself. From what I heard, your experience reflects most of the Samsung. But the Galaxy phones were so successful, that they treat them very differently. From the scarce accounts, as far as I can tell, the whole Galaxy development is vertically integrated to allow them quicker response to the competitive threats. (The problem, I heard, is that Samsung bosses, seeing Galaxy development being very successful, now throw all possible carp onto it, hoping that the business unit would also fix other broken products too.)

I do think it's exaggeration.

If you look at the Android, more innovations comes from the Android OEMs than from the Google. Tablet support, advanced camera features, multitasking, multi-window, fingerprint sensor, wearable, in-vehicle infortainment - all first were done by EOMs. Google? Fancy UI gimmicks and G+ integration everywhere.

It is really hard to imagine how one can compete with Android right now due to market inertia.

But then, if you look at the reasons why Samsung went for Tizen with the current generation of the Gear devices - dramatic improvement in battery life - one can easily see that there is a niche for other OSs too.

And if you look what path Tizen has chosen to tackle the Android domination - native support for Android apps - you can easily see that the whole premise of the RTFA is flawed. Samsung doesn't want to fragment the market: they want to make Tizen compatible with Android to avoid the fragmentation. Developers shouldn't care what OS runs their apps, as long as it provides all the APIs necessary.

I have a Palm VII. It was fiddly, but it worked and works now (although no wireless anymore) as a great password manager that is offline and will always remain offline.

The device I have that I say has the best design for being timeless is the Palm V. It is one of those things that even 15 years later, it still looks relatively modern (other than the lack of a color screen.) It held up with daily use for years until smartphones caused the device and its charging cradle to wind up on the shelf for good.

I would say that my old HP48SX calculator with a card for additional functions still works and is useful. Engineering calculations are engineering calculations, and the tactile feel of the buttons is a lot more accurate than trying to use an emulator on a smartphone.

Just the small engineering touches showed outstanding build quality. For example, the card had an edge connector, but there was a sliding metal flap that kept the connector on a card shielded until it was inserted into the calculator.

I remember an early 1990s computer case for a generic 386 (back when we had hundreds of beige box makers.) It had multiple cam locks (Medeco or Ace, forgot which), as well as a keyswitch. It wasn't made out of tinfoil sheet metal as today's cases, the thickness had to be at least 1/8 of an inch. That case was used and reused by a friend of mine because it just worked without issue, and why waste something that well made.

I wouldn't mind going back to the days of repair rather than replace. Better off to pay twice as much for something and be able to maintain/expand/upgrade it than have it break or go obsolete and contribute to more landfill clutter.

People talk about bug free code. It is a matter of won't, not a matter of can't.

Sometimes, there are products out there which can be considered "finished". Done as in no extra features needed, and there are no bugs to be found. Simple utilities like /usr/bin/yes come to mind. More complex utilities can be honed to a reasonable degree of functionality (busybox comes to mind.)

The problem isn't the fact that secure or bug free software can't be made. It is that the procedures and processes to do this require resources, and most of the computer industry runs on the "it builds, ship it!" motto [1]. Unfortunately, with how the industry works, if a firm does do the policy of "we will ship it when we are ready", a competitor releasing an early beta of a similar utility will win the race/contracts. So, it is a race to the bottom.

[1]: The exception to this rule being malware, which is probably the most bug-free code written anywhere these days. It is lean, robust, does what it is purposed to do, and is constantly updated without a fuss.

Using the back of a different envelope, let's hypothesise some mutation to ebola that gives it a 70% mortality rate (the mean of the mortality rates you cite), and a flu-like transmission profile. Then in around 5 years of cycling through the population, we'll be down to about 2.1 billion people left on the planet. That's around the population in the late 1920s to late 1930s.

Add on your 69 years for 3 generations and we'll be back to a population situation of 1933 + 69 = 2002. In short, we'd be back to the approximate population position of today.

I see that you cite American flu rates, suggesting that you may be American. Given that, likely you live there and rarely leave (average American)? Of the last 3 years I've spent about 8-9 months (I'd have to check my pay slips) living in various countries of Africa and on my last rotation out of there an aircraft fault put us down into Abidjan airport, which borders the most recent ebola outbreak. My next rotation into Africa will see me in Gabon, in the thick of the "ebola belt". Ebola isn't a theoretical issue for me, and I'm paying close attention to the vaccine work, and would consider participating in clinical trials of one.