Over the years I can think of many times we've received a call from our credit card companies to "report suspicious activity". Sometimes it's annoying (yes, we are travelling, please don't cancel our card) but other times it's saved us thousands of dollars.

I personally cannot think of anyone who has gotten a call from medical establishment to report "suspicious activity" or any other kind of "fraud alert", but perhaps others have? If not, the fact that credit card companies respond to these would make them less profitable activity than defrauding companies that don't alert or respond.

I'm a pretty big critic of fellow environmentalists who get carried away with authority, sometimes actually doing environmental harm in the pursuit of theory (e.g. ROHS, removal of recycled content lead from circuit boards, replaced with tin mined from Indonesian coral islands, oy vey. Like replacing plastic with "organic, natural" baby seal pelts).

However, in defense of the enviros and the article posted on /., organic waste really is a pretty cutting edge activity. A century ago pig farmers actually collected significant amounts of food waste, and until very recently the Egyptian Zabaleen community (Coptic Christians) ran a hugely successful organic waste collection system in Cairo. It was a fairly recent innovation to put recyclables and organics and junk into "landfills" and incinerators. It's legitimate to study public policy and efforts to achieve more sustainable cities.

When I was in charge of a state recycling program in the 90s (MA DEP), however, I found that rewarding positive behavior got better publicity than "fines" for not recycling. We ran a "recycling lottery" in Somerville where they'd choose a household at random and if they had their recyclables out, they got $200. It generated the awareness the Seattle fine is trying to achieve without the Drudge-Report-iness. It's also easier to backtrack if the whole thing turns out to be a mistake, if you've given out prizes for affirmative behavior instead of fines.

IMO our whole monetary system has evolved to promote convenience so much that we're losing basic security.

I just now cancelled a debit card because I'm tired of cleaning up after fraudulent transactions. The world is full of criminal organizations working full time to defraud anybody and everybody. I just can't see it as sustainable.

I'm guessing that this is the outbreak that will break out of sub-Saharan Africa. Rich countries probably have the infrastructure to control it when it reaches their shores, but the rest of the world may be stuck with a pandemic.

So, whether something is supernatural depends on your frame of reference? In our universe it's supernatural, but in its universe it's just that dork that's wasting its life creating universes in its mother's basement?

And if we manage to create a sentient artificial intelligence in a virtual environment, to it we'll be supernatural and that other hypothetical being will be supersupernatural?

He's not losing a tenured job, nor failing to make tenure. He was offered a job that happened to include tenure, and then the offer was revoked.

The only relevance of tenure to this story is as part of the value of the job offer that was revoked.

Geez, you could probably hire an assistant vollyball coach for that much money.

If he had a case, it would be against the people who retracted the job offer.

In the unlikely event that he wins, the lawyers should do OK out of it. He'll be left holding what little the lawyers don't take, and be unemployable for life.

It doesn't matter how prestigious the publication is, if it doesn't actually support what you want to think it does.

Last sentence of first paragraph:

Did you actually read that far? Or are you just citing it because some authority figure told you it supports your religious beliefs?

They apparently used it in the Crimea. (Some sources say Sevastopol, others Kerch.)

According to Wikipedia, when they interrogated Goering after the war, he told them the reason they didn't use their nerve gas to repulse the landings at Normandy was that they hadn't been able to make an effective gas mask for horses. The german army still relied primarily on horses for transport, and everyone learned in WWI that gas doesn't always go where you want it to.

At the end, Hitler didn't care a fig what happened to Germany. He said they had failed their destiny, and he ordered destruction of their own infrastructure. He also dragged the war on for months after it was obviously lost, to the great harm of the Geman people.

If deterrence worked, we wouldn't have had two world wars.

Bullshit. The red shift is because the low-frequency visual rays projected by the human eye has a longer range than the high-frequency ones. (The range is a limit on the number of wavelengths the rays can extend.)

A dog would see the universe entirely differently. (Who ever met a dog that believed in a cosmic red shift?)