Coors. Commonly known as "Rocky Mountain Piss Water".

Unfortunately, no. You may be aware that the air is 79% nitrogen, yet fertilizer is mostly nitrogen, because plants take nitrogen from the soil , not from the air. Corn does the same with carbon. That's one reason that corn is a stupid way to produce ethanol and switchgrass is a better choice.

There are two major reasons it DOES matter, as explained in TFA. First, much of the CO2 is not from burning the ethanol, but from producing it. Imagine if the tractors, stills, etc. burned four gallons if diesel to produce on gallon of ethanol. Every gallon of ethanol you put in your car caused four gallons of diesel to be burned. That's the concept, though of course it's not quite that simple.

Secondly, it isn't the total amount of carbon that matters. There is always the exact same amount of carbon on the planet, modulo meteorites. The problem with fossil fuels is that they take carbon out of the ground and put it into the atmosphere. It's carbon in the atmosphere that's the problem. Corn ethanol does the exact same thing - carbon from the ground goes into the corn. When you burn it, that carbon ends up in the atmosphere - just like burning gasoline.

And then there's trying to get away with it. If one teenager peeing was enough to set off the alarms and get the reservoir drained, I'm pretty sure a fleet of dump trucks would be noticed.

I'm going to start this post by saying I think they're all crap; $cientology, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, any and all brands of Neo-Paganism; the whole lot of them.

But there are some pretty clear cultural differences between, say Hinduism and Christianity on one side, and Scientologists on the other. While the former religions may have started out something like the latter ones (though I suspect it was far more complex than some guy sitting down and writing a religion purely out of his imagination), there are literally thousands of years of cultural and theological development behind them. They have had significant a longstanding influences on the civilizations in which they evolved (or were adopted).

Scientology can be traced no further back than L Ron Hubbard telling some of his far more talented peers he planned to create a religion to prove how easy and profitable it was. Unlike, say, Hinduism, which is a historical evolution of the Proto-Indo-European religion, Scientology has no real antecdent, unless you count the self help movement and Hubbard's fetishistic dislike of psychiatry.

Even the early Christians took the Jewish Bible, plopped a second part on it and mixed in some Hellenic philosophy into it, and thus has antecedents dating back centuries.

I was replying to someone wringing his hands as if it rejecting the proposal was equivalent to doing nothing about nuclear terrorists. So I challenged him/her/you to show me how they were in the same ballpark.

Wrongo yourself. For one, that's corn, not barley. For two, it caused no human (or animal) illness. Also, pigs are not cattle. Oh, and it's in a different part of the country. Given the nature of the problem, it's probably the richness of the feed such that drying won't help. But other than everything, it's dead on :-)

> So I'm still wondering what the regulation is meant to do, apart from limiting the number of PE's, or software engineers, that can apply for certain lucrative jobs.

I'm glad that someone more qualified than I has reviewed and safety of the bridges I drive on every day. Just like M.D. lets me know that a doctor meets qualifications, PE does the same - it indicates that the person I'm trusting to make life-safety decisions is somewhat qualified to do so. That is the purpose.

I'm a "small government" guy - my posts here show that. I don't like the new requirements in Texas for a locksmith license. (I briefly worked as a locksmith.). I do, however, see the purpose in defining who is qualified to sign off on the safety of a new stadium, or a high rise building. I'm glad they don't allow someone like me to decide if the new stadium is safe or not.

You have a lot of good points there.

...all the time. It's all psychology, it's human urine - therefor it is oh so terrible. Think of all the bird-droppings, huge flocks of birds flying by...doing their thing. They carry far more diseases with them than we dare to even think of, never-mind mention in the news. But human urine? Yuck ;)

Canada can build their own export facilities and deal with the environmental mess when their pipeline bursts (and their taxpayers can pick up that bill.

The problem isn't just that it's not _benefiting_ America, the problem is that it's not benefiting America AND there's a substantial risk that there will be a large scale environmental disaster that the company who owns the pipeline will never pay to clean up.

We have no reason to OK it and every reason _not_ to OK it.

I use Evernote. But I don’t trust it.

I use Evernote for most of my digital notes stuff. I like the syncing feature which keeps notes on my mac, smartphone and tablet in sync.

However I don’t trust it for really important long-term stuff. Really essential stuff, such as long writing projects, articles, essays, important letters or digital journals go into textfiles that are in directories covered by redundant backup/archive mechanisms on detached portable HDDs with filesystems that can be read with widely available free open source software (Mac OS X HFS *without* journaling).

Doing anything else with anything valuable that’s supposed to stay useable longer than a decade is insane.

For instance, I still have CD copies of CD Archives of Zip Disk Archives of very old HDDs (2,5 40 MB HDDs would fit on one ZipDisk attached via parallel port - yepp, those were the days) with texts written in Ami Pro. The Ami Pro format is openable with a regular text editor, but it still is anoying to extract the useful data. No way am I installing Dos 5 and Win 3.11 on a Vbox just to run Ami Pro just to open them. Hence, only UTF-8 textfiles since round-about 2000.

You should do the same for any journal stuff that is supposed to last longer than 3 years.

My 2 cents.

As another responder said, this concept is known as a gravity tractor.

I did say obvious technical details were still needed. You can't just park something small close to a big object; as you say the small object will be affected much more an simply be pulled in. However, since the gravitational attraction is fairly small, as you note, even a small ion engine can push enough to counter it. Since IOM engines can run for decades on a few pounds of fuel, you aim them at 45 degree angles (so as not to push the asteroid) and poof, the asteroid is pulled towards the space craft - slowly and over a long time, but it is pulled and a little is all you need.

It's not something you can do if you discover an asteroid that will impact in less than a year, this requires time as the effect isn't huge. However, a small effect over 3, 5 or 10 years is plenty to slow down or speed up the asteroid such that it will miss us. You only have to make it get to the time and place of intersection with earth a day or even a few hours later or earlier and the problem is solved.

If we discover an asteroid coming in 6 months, we're basically screwed. There is no Armageddon Movie answer that fixes it.

E-coli isn't airborne. Nor is BSE. Both of your links point to the same article in dutch. According to the translated abstract the problem was an atypical botulism and it had no impact on human health. A successful treatment was devised in the midst of the outbreak.

Actually what I do is more heavy wizardry than deep magic. :)