BTW, the grandparent post was written in a "trollish" wording on purpose - but I seriously consider the electric comet theory - and would advise anyone not tending to hold "the most accepted current theory" in science as if it were a religious fact. If anyone one is curious about it, give it a read.

Now - I just got to this article and video depicting an explosion in Mars that fits quite well with the electric comet model - but which would get a hard time being explained by ice blocks: https://missiongalacticfreedom...

There is no water coming out of comets. What is detected are OH- ions, that are believed to be derived from water - which is not there - but can equally derive from ionized oxygen combined with protons (A.K.A. H+) from the solar wind.

I wonder why do they still write "icy comet nucleus" if no comet photographed up to today - and we have at least three close encounters with crafts - had displayed icy features. All of them are pretty much rocky.

By now it should be obvious that the light-show given by comets is electric in nature, and has nothing to do with melting ice or snow.

Just uplad everything, and let the netowrk be your backup.

Q. "So who cares about IQ anyway?"
A. MENSA members!

Given TFS later tells of "1.5 billion years since switching off", and the impossibility of measuring 300.000 years accurately in this context, I suppose the reactor was active for 300 million years, not 300 thousand years. Is ee the "300000" number is in TFA, but it looks suspect.

It is brain-dead stupid!

How much of the total plant bio-mass are you processing to start with when you are dealing with corn? 2%? 3%? (That is until you get to
the actual fuel, which is much less than that.) When you do Biofuels from farming monoculture the proper way (if such a thing is possible at all), like from sugar-cane, where maybe 30-50% of the biomass is the part to be processed into biofuel, you may be getting some improvement over oil status-quo. With algae you maybe can achieve 100% of the biomass to start processing, sounds even nicer.

But from Corn? It is so stupid, it does not even deserve a proper adjective. It is even stupid to waste time making "studies" on it.

Trying to do it is only about corn super-production, hype, and abuse of government subsidies to plant corn, all mixed with a large, big
dose of the reverse of common sense.

You are new to this "capitalism" thing, aren't you?

The problem seems to be that the managin practcies of breaking work in "time unites" rather than tasks makes us allbelieve it is the right thing to do. But as a matter of fact, outside a big construction company (and I am not shure how it is dealt inside such a company), one would not hire the builder to "build a wall in 20 hours", and I pay you this per hour. The only sane thing to do is to hire the builder to build the wall - he will take his time, and make his price for that. In the slavish software development World dictated by this managing techniques, we all learned to think of the "man hour" as a reality - when what should happen is a contract to build a software piece. So, yes, the bugs problem should be built in the price for building the "software piece", up to reasonable time after deployment and seriousness of bugs. But also, that implies that the idea of ordering one to "build this piece of software in 8 hours" is also nonsense.

Given that for each "not immediate dismissable" time traveler there are thousands of plausible future-tellers, I don't know how
positive identifications of "events published before they happen" could actually signal one rather than the other.

After the Orwell's 1984 fiasco had not Bezzos "promised" he would never use this feature again?
(Yanking content from the users?)

The TFS gives away the "criminal" practices - "polygraph-beating techniques, which are said to include controlled breathing, muscle tensing, tongue biting and mental arithmetic. " - so now they will come after /. as well... :-)

And maybe, commenters who quote TFS...

Fortunately when the sit me down for interrogation, now I know all that is needed is byte the tongue for not giving away the ID numbers of my fellow /.ers; So, don't worry!

H.I.F.T.F.Y.