There are thousends upon thousends of similar holes (all filled with water) on Yamal peninsula. Many are few kilometers in diameter, most are smaller. This one may be new, but quite common in the area. Obviously it's due to gas eruptions of some kind. Landscape is like from the LOTR.

Somebody do something!

"Excellent" idea. In next installment they'll rename into "Civil Protection" or "Metrocops". HL2 becomes reality at least in this dystopian way.

This article clearly shows why you should go metric.

So, cops will look like Borg. What else is new...

Thank you for your observations. Apparently we live in two different worlds. In my world there are (still) sirens and warning signs that are used in case of an emergency. In fact those sirens are turned on for testing purposes on every first saturday in month at noon. Also, I counted eleven (11) instances of a "F" word in your (anonymous) writing. I suggest that you practice that activity more. Live long and prosper.

First, my deepest condolences to all families and friends of dead and injured in this explosion. Apparently, some facts need further clarification. April 19th is a critical date in US history, since, whereas siege at Waco, TX ended on that date probably by coincidence (ATF went in on that particular day after 50 days of siege, negotiating and waiting), it was Tim McVeigh who "comemoraded" that day (and the deadly siege) two years later by bombing federal building in Oklahoma City. To do that he used masive amounts of fertilizer as an explosive. Fertilizer itself is inert, but under certain conditions it may explode. In any case after that bombing sale of fertilizer is severly restricded and I suppose non-farmers are not even capable of obtaining big amount of it. So, if somone wants to make a huge explosion by fertilizer the only other option (apart from stealing it) is to set it on fire wherever it may be. Either some stock on some farm, or directly in some fertilizer factory. I surely hope that this explosion is caused by an accident. However it's up to authorities to determine how did this happend, and possibly why the affected area had not been evacuated after initial fire broke out.

Has anyone noticed that tomorrow (on April 19th) there will be 20 year since deadly siege at Waco, TX?

Science. Making ideas possible.

So Douglas Adams nailed it when he wrote that the universe would be replaced with something bizzare, whereas others believe that it alreaty happened.

What could possibly go wrong?

Finding Higgs boson (or proving it's predicted existence) may not yield any practical implication. However, having many thousand of the brightest and smartest engineers and scientists working close together, and collaborating on singe (or multiple) endeavors like this (and similar others) surely brings many practical things to life. Say, for example, World Wide Web, which, coincidently was "discovered" precisely in CERN, so that you and me can today read and write in more casual manner then using old-fashioned telnet (vt100 emulated), or using ftp or gopher, and whatnot. Even technology used in building CERN's fine detectors is engineering marvel, pieces made just for that task, so surely many innovative approaches were used. In that sense, Higgs boson is the goal, but much more important, in my opinion is how to reach that goal. Along that path there are many other, much more practicable discoveries. Whether or not we'll some day be able to carry around gadgets capable of producing few TeV of energy (as finding Higgs with 125 GeV necessitates having an order of magnitude or more source energy) who knows. So far the only such "gadget" is in CERN, uses exorbitant amount of electricity, radiates all around profusely when turned on, etc. But hey, as one said, if "laser" was first cumbersome, but now it's everywhere, the who knows...

These guys are not ISPs, these are telecoms. They (apparently) succesfully pushed out of the business real ISPs and are now trying to pose as such. In fact Internet is and was succesfull because it works by "best efforts". I would argue that ISPs (EUROISPA) would have different attitude towards "net neutrality".

I wonder how long will it take for the government(s) to decide they in fact own every computer (or at least it's processing capabilities) and issue some sort of mandatory backdoor. As it seems antivirus companies might be first compelled to "go along" with the new paradigm, by probably "not detecting" presence of some (government?!) software (that we oldfashionedly still call "malware", whereas these pieces of code are highly focused towards very specific target, so majority of users/comp. owners should have no problems whatsoever with the sinister part of said software). Indeed, grim future may even be "you should let that piece of software alone, if you have nothing to hide". Weather or not this story has anything to do with the _NSAKEY.

If the tiniest amount of storage is on molecular level, the total capacity of "memory" of a person is HUGE.