No matter what any government agency or official says about new limits regarding establishing back doors or weakened encryption in algorithms or hardware, interception of communications, analysis of meta data of US citizens communications, secretly installing root kits, etc. One must now, and forevermore, assume that they are lying. It will be outright lies (kind of hard now because they supposedly don't know all of what Snowden has passed on), partial lies, and misdirection.

It's all being done or our own good, of course.

The wildfire model appears to ignore some parameters encountered in wildfires: air temperature, insolation, wind speed and patterns in 3D, terrain, relative humidity, moisture in the plants, winds created by the fire, litter, and some interactions between the local winds and those created by the fire, to name a few. Perhaps there are analogs in the model.

It would have been more accurate to title this: "Do Earthquakes Spread as a Wildfire Model Predicts Wildfires Spread?"

Never the less, it's ingenious.

Get a second phone line and change the plan for the first, if necessary to the least expensive available with voice mail. Let your contacts know about your number change. Unplug the first phone but check the voice mail when ever you feel like it. After you no longer get calls from your contacts on the first phone you might give up the line. Then the person who next gets that number will have a surprise. It may be worth the extra cost.

I've had my phone number for 5 years and am still getting dunning calls for the previous owner. A side benefit from using the "new" number is that I no longer receive annoying "spam" calls.

The link provided by the OP is 14 years old. This is not evidence that current GPS satellites have optical (or any of the sensors mentioned) on board. They could be on board but the optical sensor is designed to detect "the optical time signature of NUDET bursts " which is probably not the same as a wildfire shortly after ignition. If the detector could also designed or tweaked to detect very small fires this would be a real advance.

The detector is not just a camera with a telephoto lens and IR filter (works in Hollywood, though) , that would work for near IR (NIR) but not thermal IR (TIR) since silica glass is opaque to TIR and the silicon sensor array of the camera would not detect TIR. Lenses and filters must be of more exotic materials and I think that the detector array would be micro-bolometer based but there may be others.

Additionally the GOES satellites are geo-stationary which means that they can "look" at a hot spot long enough to detect enough energy for discriminatiion unlike GPS which cannot.

While it may be true that 'NOBODY, especially environmentalists, have "banned controlled burns" anywhere on the planet.' never the less they have been effectively halted in many venues. Two main reasons are: 1) Lack of funding - There's little funding for prescribed burns (US lingo) and 2) Agency and personal liability - If there is no chance the prescribed fire can escape it probably won't burn well enough to accomplish objective of the burn. Thus there is always the possibility of escape. Escaped fires are immensely expensive to the agency conducting the burn AND to the managers that signed off on the burn and the crew conducting the burn. If someone injured or dies then there can be criminal charges as well. In years past California had an insurance program to take care of the cost of escaped burns but that program is no more.

The old adage that "there's never enough money for fire prevention but there's always enough for fire suppression" was old 30 years ago and is still true today.

I wonder if she starts out any of her "coprolite 101" classes with "This is a coprolite, it's fossilized dung. You may think it's just old shit but it's my bread and butter."

(I knew a Parasitologist who started his first lecture of his course somewhat like that.)

He probably meant to to say "I'm not so much a grammar Nazi as someone who believes that if one's going to write something for a large (or even small) audience one should make an effort to write clearly in respect for that audience. I'll probably get the "You jerk, you know what he meant!" response but I stand by my point."

I'll probably get the "You jerk, you know what he meant!" response, too, but I stand by my point.

>>
Architects in the early 20th century came up with an interesting solution to this: use a third dimension, and install elevators. Now you can walk horizontally in two dimensions, and travel up/down, bringing a large company's employees all within relatively short distances of each other.

That crossed my mind but it's not as cool as Jobs' solution. On the other hand, not being a genius innovator, I think I'd like my office to be on the opposite side of the ring from the CEO's.

WIth a diameter of about 1/3 of a mile a collaborator will need to walk about 1/2 mile for a face to face in the other's office on the opposite side of the ring. Good exercise but perhaps a waste of time.

And where's the write ring?

Because I've been using it for a very long time, most likely well before you were born.

BTW don't the TOS for this site forbid an hominem attacks?

Good analysis but the poster was perhaps too well mannered to mention the indelicate fact that Geeks also bite off the heads of live chickens every once in a while. All others are wannabe Geeks.

It's so hard to craft sarcasm in writing so that it's recognized for what it is.

There's two parts to the bill AFAIK, the heads up glasses and that the computer is a wearable computer. It appears that it's OK to wear the glasses if they are connected to, say, a notebook, or a table, etc (maybe even a smart phone).