I think they are confusing wind erosion with water erosion. Moisture gets absorbed in rocks even in vacuum - probably the Moon might have some crystal water in some silicates too - , but Mars probably never had a temperature/gravity pressure to sustain liquid water on the surface, unless solar output was much different. The atmosphere is extremely thin, but because of low gravity, 1/3 of Earth's dust flies up easier too. Otherwise the temperature/pressure is probably at the solid/gas transition. Here, the pressure ranges from 0.0044 psi(0.003 atm) on Olympus Mons's peak to over 0.1675 psi (0.011 atm) in the depths of Hellas Planitia, so it's between 0.3% and 1.1% of the atmospheric pressure we have on Earth. The triple point of water is 0 degrees C (more like 0.01) and 0.006 atm, or 0.6% of that on Earth. So in theory, there might have been liquid water extremely close to the triple point, but the temperature would have to be above 0 (which is probably rare) and under 20C or so (under room temperature.) Just cuz you could have a puddle of liquid water physically existing in the open atmosphere of Mars, it does not mean that it would not evaporate away super fast, as even iced over frozen clothes hung out to dry in the winter eventually dry even under the freezing point in the sun (and you have to be careful not to break your jeans or underwear when frozen and brittle, they are very fragile), so a puddle of liquid water would evaporate very fast unless the atmosphere is at 100% humidity or close to it, under such pressure, and then once in the atmosphere, the gravity of Mars is so weak that it would easily reach terminal velocity and escape. And you can tell that it would, from the atmospheric composition of Mars which is 96% CO2 at molecular weight 44, 1.9% Argon, 1.9% Nitrogen, and traces of oxygen, carbon monoxide, methane, water, etc. Molecular weight of water is 18, and much lighter than 28 for nitrogen and 32 for oxygen or 44 for CO2. Planets with cold enough surface and high enough gravity capture hydrogen too from the solar wind, including all the gas giants like Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn and Uranus, with a molecular weight of 2, but Mars is too weak gravitationally to go as low as 18, and Venus is too hot to go as low as 18, and they boil off hydrogen at 2, water at 18, nitrogen at 28, oxygen at 32, and only have CO2 and H2SO4 and the like remaining in the leftover distillate, while Jupiter boils off nothing, but earth boils off hydrogen at 2, helium at weight 4, but does not boil off methane at 16, water at 18, nor nitrogen 28, oxygen at 32, etc. So liquid water does not exist on Mars under present circumstances because it boils off fast from the surface pond and then boils off fast from the atmosphere into outer space. If in the past the temperature were colder, by ether lower solar output (like ice age on earth), or by Mars being in a farther away orbit, and then getting knocked closer by something else, but farther away it was just the proper amount of cold to hold water on its surface atmosphere, at least you could have had a saturated water vapor atmosphere on Mars, but it might have been under zero celsius, to where yes, you have water, but it's all ice, like at the poles, and never liquid, simply because Mars lacks the gravity to hold it in the atmosphere under enough pressure where it can stay there over 0 degrees required by liquid water, otherwise the only water on Mars is in the solid/gas transition range in the graph below: http://www.sv.vt.edu/classes/M...
I think they are confusing wind erosion with water erosion, or maybe ice/glacier erosion remotely possible if you fly off on a tangent of coincidences and luck, but never liquid water. Mars is too small for water. Venus is a whole lot of different story, about the same size as Earth, and all it would need to get life on it pronto is that at its Lagrange point it needs to wear some huge ass shades to be cool.

Yeah.

The GOP is the party of military perverts, hunters, WWF fans, and they don't like artsy fartsy movies, but love a good Hollywood flick full of sex, guns, violence, car chases, and action. They also love gassing foreginers as labrats as they push the boundaries and ask questions about OSHA and EPA regulations, and do secret tests where the rubber meets the road. I made really good money being a guinea pig for them and getting gassed by their less than lethal chemical weapon's research things, and it was employment at will where they just let me leave when I wanted to, I was not obligated to work there by other than messing up my job stability and work history and such. But I too learned valuable lessons in real life, and they too. Like, when handling chlorine gas, they used to dress up in astronaut gear for safety, and when one of the chlorine reaction cylinders got stuck and they had an incident, that they could not fix, they called the supplier, and watch him do it, while they stood in their astronaut self contained breathing apparatus gear. So the supplier guy, while eatin a sandwich with one hand, asked what's the problem, they told him, so he held his breath, walked up to the leaky cylinder, and turned it off with his hand, and came back asking anything else? And kept eating his sandwich. That's what republicans like. Some real life cut the crud macho shit, as opposed to the artsy fartsy oh lets be safe no matter how expensive and retarded democrat crap. And the real answer is somewhere in between, some kind of balance, because, after all, the dense and heavy chlorine gas was the first chemical weapon used to flood the French and German trenches during WWI, with mass casualties of pneumonia but in the end the kill rate was much less than bullets and other ammo, so what's preferable to disable an enemy, a full kill or less than lethal? It's reeeally reaaally complicated, and there is no easy answer, and neither too macho idiots getting themselves sick left and right, like lemmings jumping to the sea, are right, nor artsy fartsy pussies scared to get a whiff of bleach and dressing up as astronauts with self contained scuba diving breathing apparatus while they pour the bleach from walmart into their washing machine. Yeah, that's the kind of stuff they are secretly studying. Pollution, safety, health, less than lethal weapons, etc, and it kinda sucks being a guinea pig for them, and they try to use criminals or ex criminals or terrorist suspects, also the pay is decent, but it's like making minimum wage at a clean job is much preferable to getting gassed with chemical weapons research gases, that, hopefully have been through the animal testing stage of gassing rats first and none died, but still its like there is no amount of money that makes it worthwhile to get pneumonia on a job, or shorter life expectancy, or mental/brain nerve damage, as a lot of chemical weapons are nerve agents. What's right and wrong? The most important part is to not be forced to do it, like a prisoner, or obligated by a contract like debt, or having to raise kids, also there might be something about reproductive issues such as those Spartans who have already sired a son in the movie 300 participated in the suicide mission, so coupled with a life insuance/workman's comp policy it might be a different ballgame too for fathers, ethics is really really complicated. Also people that apply for military duty accept that they are willing to risk their own welfare in service of the greater good, like the country, but then you have to be careful with the research not to be a mere waste, by either not getting any information because there is not enough effect, nor by getting too much effect and destruction like brain damage or nerve damage. It was like I was immune to the treatement for a long time, then suddenly quit, without seemingly being sick enough, and then I'd get like job interviews in other places, next to a police station talking to 3 guys that look like police officers, or more like military people, and they test me on the basics, including wpm typing speed, and draw their conclusions and off I go into the real world again. Until it might be time to do another round of this making a living by fishing the cheese out of the mousetrap hoping not to get caught in it as a mouse. The rewards are high, but the risks are huge. Who likes to eat cheese like that when you can just eat some old seeds or grain or whatever chipmunks harvest, instead of cheese? A minimum wage job with no overtime is much nicer, than a high paying really risky one with a million hours of overtime, so I personally much prefer safety, health, comfort and minimum wage, but that also means no ability to raise a family and sure extinction like that, and being called a pussy by republicans. Whatever. I prefer minimum wage. Especially that it gives me a great excuse not to buy Obamacare, it's like what's my incentive to make more money when the government takes it from me anyway, like demolish my house, forces me to buy shit I don't wanna buy like insurance, forces me to pay annual car registration fees, forces the landlords to pay high property tax, it's like I love minimum wage just to stick it to Obama and say here, motherfucker, it's not enough money to pay for your stupid retarded bullshit laws you passed, and as long as you take my money and give it to the mofos on welfare, and keep me childless that way, I don't have a good enough incentive to get up in the morning and go out and make that dollar and be productive, because you take it away anyway, and if I don't make it, what are you gonna take?

If you could create partial wave function collapses, or partial interactions, in that a particle spread out to the other end of the galaxy interacts with something there partially, without fully collapsing the whole wave function there, and based on that interaction whatever is left over over here would have different leftover properties, then superluminal velocity communication would be possible, even if matter and energy transport such as a ship would still be stuck limited by the speed of light. As in, your body and ships could get around only so fast, but you could do communication like telepathy instantly back and forth to the other branches of this galaxy without a lag that interaction via transmitted and modulated photons and the like would suffer from. Have they ever come across partial wavefunction collapses, that leave the quantum wave's ("quantum particle's") state tainted? If you could figure out how to trigger a collapse reproducibly, including how to trigger a partial wavefunction collapse, reproducibly, than watch the other collapse transmit data that way, you would break the speed limit of light on communications like Internet and satellite. Who likes speed limits anyway?

PS. Sigh, I only get 2 posts per day so I have to save it in a text file and wait for the time before I can post other than anonymous coward. But the above are some more ideas I had when I wrote that other post. I'm out of that train of thought now, other than, imaging ping times of 2 milliseconds to Pluto and playing an Internet game with them, or 2 millisecond ping times to Alpha Centauri or halfway across the galaxy. Would be nice, right? Reality shows, video conversations, etc. For now a roundtrip pingtime from Earth to Sun is 16 minutes, and if there were a spaceship near opposite of Earth in the same orbit as Earth, it would have an Internet ping time of 32 minutes. I'm too lazy to look up Mars, but for now you can't really play an online game with people from Mars, other than a correspondence chess, where you mail the next move, it arrives in an envelope, they look at it, and then mail you back a move. People used to play chess like that.

There is a misunderstanding here.
Light does not behave both as a wave and a particle.
Light behaves only as a wave, with peculiar properties, called quantum waves.
Light is always a wave-packet extended out in space, not localized into a very limited domain as a particle would be, but it always interacts or collapses and disappears as a particle, at a single location, as a quantum jump or quantum transition of suddenness a pointlike point in space. That's all.
They only way to get a continuous-like energy transmission out of light is to have many such "atoms" of energy act like they are an infinitesimal and continuous phenomena, just like pressure on an engine cylinder piston might seem like some smooth, continuous uniform function, but in reality, according to the kinetic theory of gases, or even observable under the microscope as the Brownian motion, the force on the cylinder piston is actually quantized and happens in jumps, in a sort of non-smooth, non-differentiable mathematical function way, when you inspect the devil in the details part.

Light is a quantum wave, not a quantum particle, nor a continuous smoothly variable wave.
Which is what Max Planck came up with as the only possible answer to solve the ultraviolet catastrophy paradox.
He never said light was a particle, in that it is limited to a point like region of space.
That's all the double slit experiment proves:
Light or electrons or all quantum waves (we customarily call quantum particles) are:
1. Extended and spread out in space as they travel about as spread out waves in between quantum interactions, including they self diffract, i.e. they only interact with themselves.
2. Every time they interact with other particles, or in ways we call "quantum transitions" they seem to pick a seemingly random point to do it at, based on probabilities as far as we can describe, and they interact in a very sudden way in a very limited infinitesimal point like point in space, which causes their wave function collapse suddenly everywhere else, including halfway across the galaxy and all come together concentrated in on local point, and as a consequence give birth to another quantum thing, which may be spread out in space freely traveling about, like the electron was before in the double slit electron, or it may give rise to a "captured", limited to a very local domain of vibration, but still not infinitesimally small along the lines of a wavefunction collapse interaction, but still somewhat extended in space, such as stuck in an electron shell in an atom, or inside the nucleus in a weird way, an electron joined with a proton and antineutrino giving a neutron, but it's more complicated than that, instead we ascribe it as quarks, an electron is one configuration of quarks, a proton another, etc, quarks being 1/3, 2/3 in value, and only combinations of quarks that yield whole numbers are allowed, or something like that.

So there is no wave-particle duality, in that quantum particles have wave tasting properties such as diffraction, and they have particle tasting properties, such as momentum, or quantumness. All there is is a single contraption called a quantum wave, which is neither a quantum particle limited in space as it gets around, nor a continuous wave that spreads out as it gets around, including it interacts in a spread out and continuous fractional way. Not possible. Quantum waves travel about spread out, and every time they interact with something other than themselves, they do so suddenly, at an infinitesimal local point which withdraws the spread out parts and annihilates them suddenly even from halfway across the galaxy distance, at speeds faster than the speed of light. We don't know what triggers a collapse, the most we know is statistics and probabilities. For now.

Yeah.
But how can you ascertain that? Have laser detectors? What if they used focused microwave heating? You'd have to get the full EM spectrum, with a sensor different than temperature, as you already know the temperature went high.

Often though, such "mysterious practice attacks" are staged, and used as a pretext to start a war. That's what the Germans did when blitzkrieging Poland, and that's what the Japanese did in Korea before attacking China. I think it was train sabotages staged in both cases, which triggered a retaliation along the lines of 911, though it would be a hard sell to say 911 was a staged thing to give the US an excuse to enter war and improve or jump start its economy by giving people a job, if you have no market demand for anything, start a war, and have people make weapons, then these people who earned that money in turn will take it to a barber, then the barber takes it to a restaurant, then the waitress takes it to a grocery store, etc, etc. Still, 911 was not staged quite to the level that the WW2 igniting fake train sabotages were.

So you never know the true actual cause, and you have to take all "news" with a grain of salt. This is my ultraparanoid side speaking. Hello.

But when tensions get high around the world, and everyone worries about the other guy and wants to stay one step ahead in the military game, sometimes they irk to test out their gadgedts, with micro-skirmishes, so it's like you have a fuzzy conflict with 0.004% engagement as opposed to all or nothing 1.0000 we are at war, or 0.0000 we are at peace, and in such conflict and tension even fake news are that, a micro-skirmish in psychological warfare.

So who knows? Even if someone knows, when something is released as news, it may still be fake. And lots of stuff go down in the world that are important and never make it to be public news, so the question is sometimes how or why who decided to make this a news and why?

hahahaha
ceriosli, y da fuk wud dey kip piss in around kreatin al bedo deilie, wen u ken jus poot up sum flippo bowl sheydz via a re mote by da Lagrange pt bit ween da Earth & da Sun? Laik sowler penolz & luminumum me rerz, maid phrom looner metierielz? i bin a staut ad voket of sutch a teng, & I tink sum body hoo got da meenz shewd dew it, cuz I b brawk, e.g. I kent aphord no rokitz 2 go 2 da moon 2 DIY ma celph. Lewk, I ken teevn spel, c?

I used to make a living working with organophosphates (basically octyl phosphoric like acids) to run chemical process lines, and I had a hunch of the whole thing being an experiment for getting gassed with less than lethal weapons, of possibly phosphate nature, different from the above mostly benign chemicals, me being the lab rat getting gassed, and should I show at a hospital, detected organophosphates can be ascribed to exposure on the job to the benign stuff, possibly allergy to it. That was the only place I ever worked at by buying COBRA health insurance from my previous job, it was obvious during the interview tour that it would be needed. Second time around I wasn't as chicken, went without insurance. Third time around they talked me into it when I said I did not want to waste their money. Still, I got sick three times and they let me quit three times, they emphasized, they emphasized that I came there out of my own good will and nobody was forcing me to come there. I did not even have to do the two week notice. It's kinda like making a living through stealing the cheese from the mousetraps, if you're a mouse. The rewards are high. Yeah. Whatever. At least the rewards were high, unlike at the very next job, getting near minimum wage where I got a whole lot sicker from mandatory hand sanitizer use, and some kind of floating fuzz airborne infection, plus being left all alone sitting in a chair working with nobody for yards around me, for 12 hrs, and just got insanely sick sitting there, even without hand sanitizer, felt kinda like a deep sunburn, my best guess was xrays. So it's like, what's the difference, it's mousetraps everywhere anyway, except some traps have cheese, and some have some bitter green grass. Which one do you prefer choosing? So they say fourth time is a charm.

I just got hit with some grey goo, war is evolving, throat yeast infection, I wonder why, I guess posting on slashdot the way I do has consequences. Whatever, is this all you got? Bring it on motherfuckers, keep'm coming. I'm on it. Ha ha ha.

After a lot of ways have failed, including shocking the tooth gums with 3V electric - ouch, it's like nothing, nothing, nothing, then an avalanche pierces through and burns like hell, and it doesn't work - so what seems to work and the way I'm fighting it right now is:

1. Soak in saliva 10 mg solid salt salty tasting sodium bromide from Walmart pool chemical.
2. Once nicely soaked, inhale some bleach chlorine gas that should generate elemental bromine by driving the redox potential oxidizing inside the cells, even from outside the cell walls with all channels shut, and bromide, is there to accept it in a Trojan horse behind the cell wall kinda way.
3. Hit it with a UV blue light LED that should activate elemental bromine into free radicals, kinda like methane reaction with bromine is initiated. Once you brominate the crap out of the yeast's internal enzymes, iodine based hormones and DNA, it's done, it's better and faster than trying to drink a lot of mountain dew with brominated vegetable oil that only releases bromine related stuff on digestion by the fungus.
4. Into the cleared, sterile spot lick and then swish with saliva around some green lemon fungus, that produces penicillin-like stuff. I think the true penicillin mold is white, and this green one produces some antibiotic that tastes sweet, somewhat like penicillin but it's not penicillin. When I was a kid every time I got really sick my snot turned green, that's how I knew I was sick, or maybe that's the right color when I'm sick. So you have to pack something friendly into the sterile fungus conduits, else if you leave it empty, the remnants on the disease yeast in other parts of your body will flow back into the dead conduits and repopulate and you're back to square one. Once the green fungus from citrus that knows how to make penicillin takes a foothold, then enjoy the fight between it and the disease. If not successful, and the disease wins, then try again.

The green fungus from citrus is friendly. Citrus fungus was discovered by A. Fleming. Fleming did not discover penicillin. Fungi did billions of years ago. What Fleming discovered is how to infect yourself with penicillin making fungus, and have a controlled substance regulated by law in your body for free, without breaking the law, plus as an active live culture that makes other antibodies besides penicillin and really knows how to fight in the highly acidic sour conditions of the grey goo, war is evolving scenario. Biowarfare. Happening as I'm typing above my right wisdom tooth, and the grey goo is losing, until I fall asleep from anesthetics, or eat something tainted, then start over.

PS. A selenium sulfide shampoo soak, that any fungus grabs onto and can't say no to, even in overdose, is best prior to the bromide/chlorine/UV treatment. I think even selenium sulfide is UV reactive and activated, not sure. With light, no matter how much crystal clear glass like goo the fungus ejects, it's not like a chemical that gets purged, though you do deplete the internal bromine stores, so you might have to repeat the above for a while until it tires out.

Microsoft is fucking up. I thought Linux or the GPL was their antichrist. Their job is to maintain and sustain their own genetic variability in the computing genepool, without going extinct or exterminating others completely. Microsoft is fucking up on both fronts. All they have to do to compete with Linux (that used to run google.com) or BSD (that used to run yahoo.com) is to drop that fucking stupid ass client access license from Windows Server. People hate and despise getting screwed like that. Client access license? Are you kidding me? Sell me a server that takes up to 10 connections, up to 100, up to 1000, or up to 10,000, or up to 100,000, or up to 1,000,000 concurrently, and don't fucking make me hoard a pile or these certificates per seat with the woven thread and funky official holier than thou humbug about them. All people wanna do with those CAL certificates is wipe their shitty asses. That's Microsoft's only problem on the server front. Their job is not to accept Linux, because now they can no longer attack it like they used to, once they give it their blessing, but to push their own shit, and push it in balance and harmony with the rest of the ecosystem.
Your job is
1. to survive, or go down fighting for something that you care about to survive
2. to not exterminate other varieties in your vehement competition against them
Microsoft has and still is fucking up royally on both fronts. We don't want them running Linux. We don't want them to give their blessing to Linux. And especially we don't want no fucking cloud with blackmailed monthly access fees to our data held hostage. What we want is something better than a "Vista sucks" on the desktop, a better and improved Win2K or XP, leaner and meaner, with less garbage and snooping piled on into it.

Intellectual property rights were erected during the founding father's days out of nothing, to create a better world, to create and enhance creativity, but intellectual property, unlike, say, land or chattel property, was always meant to be temporary, and ultimately enter the public domain, where all human knowledge and information ultimately belongs, including all GPL stuff after copyright expiration should enter public domain. Initially the terms were 14 years renewable to 28. These days we have temporary intellectual property, but it just got extended to 90 years from 70 around 1999. Why stop there? Why not have a 547 year and 6 month term? What's fair? Just how much more extra incentive did Walt Disney have to create Mickey Mouse if he knew that in 1999 the terms on his property were gonna be 90 years not 70?

Intellectual property was not erected to create a world of extorting or hogging property then blackmailing everybody for access to it. Such as music artists that get paid 3 cents out of a dollar for a song, the rest goes to the labels or publishers that extorted a signature to sign the property rights over. Yes, marketing, distribution, being a merchant is hard work that does deserve a fair cut. But fair is all a matter of price. Yes, sometimes people throw stuff away for peanuts because that's their perceived value, and then whoever buys it and resells it, to someone who values that item much more, yes, there is this winning, or lottery effect, or money for free effect in the world, because perceived values are allowed to fluctuate widely. But there are situations like music artists, who would like a bigger cut of the price, but they are strongarmed into deals, and there are consumers who want a lower price on the music, and both these tendencies tend to cut into the profit of the middle man, the publisher, or intellectual property right hogger. Just cuz the rules on intellectual property have artifacts that can be technically abused, you should not forget about the good will or good intentions of why they were erected in the first place: to spur creation of new material. How is the richest guy on the planet fit in with this picture? Obviously he carries a lot of bad will, just like Carnegie and Rockefeller did, but not because people are petty and jealous, but they have this sense of fairness or fair cut. Like, instead of making 50 billion for yourself with something that started out as MS DOS (copying CP/M almost the same exact way as ReactOS copies Windows, or as Windows copied the look and feel of Apple), why isn't 500 million enough for a family? Instead of paying 80K for top programmers fresh out of college and run them like a slave til they burn out, because by that time it's time to hire the latest experts, and in computing a 22 year old is a greater expert than a 55 year old, or at least used to be, in the 90's, why not create a stable world, with a career for a lifetime, and pay these kids 300K instead of 80K, and make them compete for the jobs internally, whether old or young, like HP had various units during the HP way days, often duplicating each other's work, but those that did a better job made it, and those that did not, got disbanded, and always fresh seed, fresh teams started.

What's with this fucking cloud and even more power mongering, then wondering why games like Kill Bill are made, whack-a-mole style? They create a lot of bad will with their power mongering to where people who have half a brain of an intellect and some sense of fairness and justice will do anything not to have to work for Microsoft, or even deal with it. You can make all that money but you can't take it to the grave. Yes, you can give it to your tribe, and that's important too, but somehow, some, at least 50/50 deals between workers and owners sound more fair than 97% owners and 3% creators, or even 3% owners and 97% creators is much better, and spurs creativity, spurs a better world, the reason why intellectual property was erected and created out of nothing, not for setting up a world where people blackmail each other for basic access to knowledge, where even all public domain is endangered, and where terms are temporary, but practically infinite. Otherwise it may be necessary to go back to the no intellectual property whatsoever world. It all comes down to overly arrogant, aggressive, exterminating others behaviro or overly lame, overly pussy, overly self exterminating behavior, neither of which strike a good balance.

Microsoft's job is to create good products, not the "bless the GPL." If they wanna go about it the way Novell Suse went, that the Linux manager, Yast, is copyrighted, while the rest of the stuff is GPL, and the system won't run right without the manager, or won't run at all, I think even Stallman would accept that, as long as improvements to the GPL sourcecode are also released.

When selling a server or operating system, the true price is not the embodied intellectual property, but the guarantee, or the insurance policy, that it will function. So the same product, like Windows Server, could be sold to a small business of 50 people, for $200, for a company of 500 for $5000, and to a company of 20,000 or a bank, military or hospital, for $1 million, and in that, the idea is that should the product fail, that purchase price is actually an insurance policy, if the 200 dollar version fails, there is a 50,000 compensation, but if the $1 million fails catastrophically, there is an insurance policy with the upper limit near $1 billion, such as stock losses, etc. This way companies that pay 1 million for a server every 10 years or 20 years know that the people who sold it to them have a strong incentive to make sure it does not fail, or will go to the end of the world and move mountains to fix a problem instead of having to shell out a billion. It's not really Linux or Windows that matters when you sell Server versions at high cost, but the insurance policy that tags along with it. And a small business of 50 should not be stuck paying exorbitant licenses, including per seat client access licenses, or even a large business should be able to choose the risks they assume, so even a 30 billion dollar business full of cheap asses who want to buy Windows Server for $50, they can, and they get a good product, but when they have an issue and call tech support, they get put on hold for 30 minutes before someone talks to them, and be told to please wait while tech supports finishes masturbating, before they can explain their problem, all based on the kind of insurance policy they carry, and the amount at stake from tech supports perspective. Even the military does not want communist linux with nobody to chase or be responsible for it. Who wrote that piece of code in linux? Who knows? Somebody! When Microsoft sells Linux Novell Suse Yast style, if they so choose to, to the military, what they mean is that they reinspected the code and they are underwriting it, to a certain amount of insurance policy coverage limit. That's what military leaders want to see. I want somebody responsible for the software I'm running, I don't want it for free and I have to be the expert myself, I'd rather pay somebody, but I don't wanna get raped in the ass on price constantly, nor have to put up with the Vista sucks bullshit, or put all my military data on some private cloud.

But for the sake of computing genetic variability, we'd much prefer a leaner and meaner and improved version of Microsoft Windows from Microsoft, not some Microsoft Linux, maybe a Microsoft BSD like OS-XYZ, that they own as private property, pay their programmers right and give a good price to their customers. And all that stuff should run on x86, arm, mips, etc, etc, all for the sake of genetic variability. Last time NT ran on anything but x86 was NT4 on DEC alpha. Just cuz Microsoft and Intel become winners of some competitive race, and they are good at exterminating others and undercutting price and giving a higher quality product, that still does not mean there is no need for genetic variability in computing. And everybody jumping on the Linux bandwagon, sell stuff where other people do the work for free, is not really the answer, even if you reinspect their work and underwrite it with a high coverage limit insurance policy.

You could add batteries to either kind of sub, moreover coolant pumps can be converted to inefficient but very quiet Tesla pumps used to pump pieces of chicken or live fish, because they work by friction.

The only giveaway for a sub is the sound echo pinging, but even that could mimic a whale or similar, recorded sounds, or it can be at a level low enough where the signal to noise ratio of the echo is near the detection limit, so it does not spread very far and gets absorbed. When anchored such a sub could stop pinging, and nothing penetrates large bodies of water, such as electromagnetic waves or xrays or gamma rays, with the exception of neutrinos, which are on the other hand very hard to detect.

With full recycling of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, and even extraction of it from seawater, a submarine could exist indefinitely self sufficient, closed circle (i.e. if all the seawater is polluted with radiation, it can recycle everything internally, using its reactor as an artificial sun to live off, in an abstract sense) and undetected, except when it runs out of fuel. And then the key strategic thing becomes mining the fuel on the sea floor, or extraction from seawater. But yeah, hiding of humans from even artificial intelligence that got out of hand on Earth would be possible better deep within the ocean, than anywhere in nearby outer space, even 70,000 years trip away, where it's easy to see, unless the spaceship there too finds a body of liquid water at tolerable pressures and enough dilute concentration of fuel to hide in.

I keep talking about how exodus to space stations is a simple solution from global biotech warfare getting out of hand or even a nuclear holocaust getting out of hand, with the exception of artificial intelligence getting out of hand, however now I realize that there is a chance to hide even from that. However, robots that could replicate, could all be submarines themselves, and produce enough units of themselves to do a one time clean sweep of all ocean waters, including mapping out the crevices surveyor style, so I guess, against 200 trillion robots patrol sweeping the oceans it would be difficult to hide, so one would have to hide behind a block of mountain, even deep within the sea, assuming robots are not interested in patrolling through solid rock and magma, but then you'd be stuck there, inside an totally isolated world or solid rock beneath the earth, maybe with a tap to a volcano magma from which to extract the fuel to live off of, and you could never come out of there or risk getting detected, so you could sit there indefinitely, at least until the Sun turns into a red giant and gobbles up earth, a few billions years from now, but on outer rocky planets like the Moons of Jupiter or Pluto or the Rock-ring of Saturn you might be able to hide out for a long long time, because the Sun will not swallow those, as far as we can tell, and then your time limit becomes the natural decay of the fuel which disappears little by little as the billions of years tick by, and eventually you'd starve, unless you come up with better physics and technology.

So the way the Navy, with the best nuclear engineers on the planet, and their ships running on reactors that are fueled once and last for 15-20 years before refueling or scrapping the whole ship, they could use ice bullets as the low cost do it all ammunition, and, during say a beach assault or even carrier planes and helicopters or drones running on lithium batteries recharged from the reactor, they could also load them with electric powered railguns and shoot ice bullets at things. True they are not as bad as grenade launchers that detonate on impact, but at least you could reserve the explosives for on impact things, as opposed to propulsion duties which you could do with a railgun, and some kind of camera flash charging setup charging a flywheel or supercapacitor for the instant high drain shooting part. So during a beach assault, if you run out of the metal bullets, you don't need a resupply and you can keep pounding the enemy, including with cannonball weight objects (and ice is 8x less dense than bronze or steel, so you need 8x the volume of cubic root of 8=twice the diameter of ice crystal ball to create the same weight of impact as a cannon ball. During a beach assault they could have a generator running on either gasoline, or ammonia from aboard a ship, or just a mobile lithium or whatever battery they can easily keep making out of seawater, including sodium air battery, or sodium sulfur, or sodium chlorine, and have one mobile car provide electricity to the troops in the trenches via powerchords. That would put a severe strain on operations and fighting abilities, being tethered to a power source with a cable, or even soldiers microwaved and fried from the accidents and errors of tracking via a cable-less wireless delivery of power (unless they look like R2D2 and C3PO and wear reflective clothing), but on the upside, on economics, you have a fully autonomous Navy unit able to function even if all of it's resupply lines have been cut, other than having to obtain its food from the sea also, like nothing to eat but fish and crabs and seaweed all year long. That way the tax payers would not even have to support them, but they'd be self sufficient, including making their own bullets, and all you gotta do is give them a new reactor loaded every 20 years.

But this idea of ice bullets is not novel, I think it was invented in the 70's in practical form during the height of espionage between the USSR and USA, where spy guns would shoot poisoned ice bullets, that leave a very tiny mark at the point of entry, and then they melt and dissolve in the body, leaving no trail for the autopsy. They contain frozen heart attack poison and the whole thing looks like a natural death from a heart attack, or pneumonia, anyeurism, etc. I think George Carlin died that way, after pissin off Da Man too much when he got really bold toward his old age no longer scared of dying, and said shit like there is a gang or club that own our country, they own you and me, there is a club oppressing everybody, and you and I are not in it. Which sounds very much along the lines of anticapitalist communist instigators propaganda messages about the factory owning burgeoisie exploiting the wage earning proletariat through property hogging of power without contributing much, and of course neither extreme view is correct, but whoever shot him, did it over no, we're tired of listening to this, this kind of talk is why we went into Vietnam, to stop the spread of communism, that, like Obamacare, takes all your private property from you and gives it to another guy, taking away your incentive to go to work and bring home the money because it's not yours anyway. It's like why should I go to work under Obamacare, all these billing agencies want a piece of me like I'm a James Brown sample, and then I can stay home, not have any money, and tell anyone sorry, we're closed today, out of samples, you gotta find another sucker to bum your next dollar out of because i don't have any. Why should I not just sit home and rest and sleep, why should I bust my ass bringing home a dollar filling my fingertips full or metal splinters and my clothes drenched in machine oil when they take it all from me. That's what Obamacare communism is, and I might be willing to pay a tax like that, but I'm not willing to pay some private organizations profit over things that hose my entire budget with cost, and I have to throw my hand up in the air and say I give up, I resign, I can't win this battle against all these bills, where housing used to be the dominant in the pareto analysis, but here comes Obamacare like a new Godzilla or King Kong in town and lays waste to my entire keeping it together budget efforts. That's communism for you, take all your private property, just like in Jamestown where the first settlers died off in bulk, until everyone got 3 acres of their own private property, and suddenly the colonies flourished, because all of a sudden people started to give a fuck, they felt like they reaped the benefits of their own labor, instead of handing it all over to somebody else, even the collective, let alone another private entity within the collective, like private insurance companies. No, I take a fucking chance in life, and my orders are that I want to live, but should I get in an accident and am bleeding, do not fucking call the ambulance but let me bleed to death on the scene, just because I want to take that chance and have a chance at living, instead of wasting the remainder of my years on trying to scrape together the 900/mo health insurance that these companies will want long term, out of which 500 is profit, and you still have to hire lawyers you can't trust and fight the insurance companies every time they reject a claim you file. Bullshit. Yeah I talk like this, and where is my ice crystal frozen poison bullet that puts me to sleep? Oh, I don't get that luxury, instead I will have to beg to die, and suffer a bit first, cuz all this stuff must really be pissin off some people.

I think the lasers idea came about the Reagan star wars, as armed GPS or similar satellites can gather a lot of solar power energy and shoot it off as a laser beam anywhere on the planet, but they don't have a supply of matter, or mass, to shoot, and even if they did, there is the shooting stars issue of combusting up in the atmosphere. True there are lots of easy ways to defend against lasers, like the posts above mentioned, but their advantage in space, where matter is scarce, is cost of the bullet rounds. In the Navy, energy is more expensive than matter, and if necessary they can shoot ice bullets if they have plenty of energy such as a reactor powering the ship. In such cases shooting ice bullets does bigger damage than laser beams for the same energy consumed, still cheaper on the budget overall.

On the issue of rail guns, yeah, they are a viable technology as long as you have a reactor attached to them and powering them, the problem with them is portability, like an assault rifle is never gonna be a railgun, because of energy density and reaction rate considerations. Chemical energy density is by far the most energy dense among those used in everyday weaponry, and energy storage like a flywheel, which can deliver energy fast, is low in density and has to constantly be charged, better on energy densities are supercapacitors, slower delivery but higher storage density, then you got batteries like lead acid cranking cars delivering 800 Amps instantaneous, which still falls short of the rate of power delivered by supercapacitors or flywheels, but much higher energy density, and the lithium batteries, which are the best rechargeable portable chemical energy storage things, suffer from low discharge rates, charging rate issues and self combustion, as the boeing and airbus planes found out when switching from nicads to lithium batteries. So who's gonna lug around a superheavy lead acid, nicad, nizn, mn/mn, or li-ion battery with an assault rifle? The bullets with gunpowder in them are robust, compact, and ergonomically portable, the problem is explosives storage as the Battle of Jutland proved for the Navy. So for portable guns, such as needed for a beach assault performed by the navy, there are no present battery technologies with fast enough drain rates required for sudden bursts of energy, but a battery + supercapacitor or flywheel combo might fix that, but the overall energy density of the best Li-ion might be 1MJ/kg, for bullets with explosives maybe 4-7 MJ/kg, and then you have Li-air batteries with slow drain rates but possible at 10+ MJ/kg in the future, and possibly even gasoline/diesel/polyethylene powered generators that spin a flywheel or charge a supercapacitor required for the next burst, kind of like camera flashers do, that might outdo the number of rounds a soldier is able to carry, even if you have to wait say 5 seconds between rounds to charge the flasher, compared to a machine gun assault rifle where the gunpowder bullets are ready and charged. This is only when portability issue is at hand, while back on a battle ship with a reactor and a freezer/cnc unit you can never run out of ice bullet rounds you can cnc-sculpt out of frozen seawater and shoot in an electric coil gun.

But in an all out war, other than chasing down pirates in Somalia where you need conventional guns, or hillbillies in Afganistan, in a world war 3 of all out war scenario only nukes prevail, as the Castle Bravo and other tests have proved. You do not want to have a WW3 and must do everything possible to avoid one, by any means necessary, but if you have to be ready for one, there is almost no point for gunpowder to actually win a battle and only nukes can do it, if anyone loses their cool, and when they do, nobody wins, which is called the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Things are not so gloomy though, there is hope for life by running away from the problems, which in case of biotech terrorist disease inventions computer virus style or a nuclear holocaust WW3 between say East Asia+India vs the EU and US style over disagreement on economics, prices and food supply issues, also population growth out of control, life can escape by living on self sustainable farming rotating cylinder space stations. Only machine intellect, should it turn violent against organic life, after it becomes smarter than organic life, along the lines of the silly movie Screamers, 1996, is the only problem from which you cannot run away from, unless you embark on an interstellar trip Star Trek or Sid Meier's Civilization style, but unlike in those movies or computer games where you hop from star to star in 2 minutes or 10 years, in reality it would probably take like 70,000 years, and, assuming machine intellect cannot come up with something better and faster, it would buy you time before they catch up with you, or maybe buy you a place off their radar not interested in chasing you down, in case they have to take 70,000 years to get to you. So that would be one way to run away from that problem, but simply running to a geostationary orbit is not running away far enough from AI dangers, but it is far enough from biotech and nuclear issues. As far as mutually assured destruction having any teeth is concerned, it's not mutually assured if one or both of the opponents escape, and the possibility escaping does increase the chances of such a war, gambling on MAD no longer being a prohibiting principle with as much teeth, but living under the mindset of mutually assured destruction is not very reassuring either, so overall a guaranteed escape and diversified portfolio is better than betting for all your eggs in one basket. It's like splitting up the eggs into many baskets increases their chances of going to war with the knowledge that their kin in the other basket is not going to be mutually assuredly destructed, however if all opponents are present in all baskets and they communicate and learn about some spat in another basket and all baskets then jump at each other's throats simultaneously, you still have issues. The only thing about war is misery and pain, and the gains obtainable from an all out war in the nuclear age are very small. Gotta find another way to settle disputes. For instance in Japan there have been instances of people promoting a best warrior from themselves, David vs. Goliath style and everyone else as a bystander, to settle a battle by playing a game of Go, and these days you could do that via computer games which sound childish and naive, or via treaties where no civilians are harmed Geneva convention style, but two opponent powers battle it out between their remote control drone swarms, and whoever wins such a war could then use their stock of drones to kill civilians with too, so it's best to just act as if there were a real war that went down with soldiers on the battle front dying, instead not one single person died or got harmed, nor a single nuke got blasted, but everyone adhered to some principles of "kosher war" and in this way sustaining and maintaining military skills against an intergalactic invasion, or, if necessary, against other humans if necessary. With nukes there should be a doctrine or no first strike, and also a doctrine of no response to a first strike, but only to a 2nd one, in a forgiving tit for tat way. Which may be the reason why 911 was two towers and two airplanes, only one hitting might have been written off as a mistake, or an accident, which it might actually have been, just like a first nuclear strike might be. It's like if North Korea shoots a nuke at the US, we should go, bro, why you had to do that, what's wrong with you? Do you really want me to do unto you as thou had done unto me? Can't we find another way to work things out, like talk it out, and if talks break down then fight things out in a kosher way where no civilians are harmed, or even military personnel, such as via computer game like drone swarm physical reality battles? And of course against such a defense all they have to do is shoot nukes off in pairs, 911 style, saying they mean business, so it's a very weak principle in trying to avert a catastrophe.

When I write about stuff like this I really like having a terrible karma posting at a default of -1 and few people reading it.

All politicians ever talk about is the economy economy economy. Why is the economy so fucking important? In my mind everyone should be able to live in absence of an economy, yeoman farmer style, and only participate in one if they find it is a good deal for them, because it's worth it economically, and otherwise they can abstain from participating in an economy DIY everything themselves. That means no mandatory bills of any kind other than voluntary ones such as cell phones or internet access, but no rent, no sewer/gas/electric bill, no food cost. And in this city dwellers who are gotten by the balls or by the stomach on the food supply and food cost issue, unable to DIY because of not enough area per person, are most vulnerable, and almost cannot be trusted on voting, just like the founding fathers said it, but then also, no great civilization or technology existed without cities. It's like mayan stargazing priests that invented zero and with that a positional numbering system equivalent to the hindus we call arabic as opposed to having to do math with roman numerals, so the priests of the mayans were like city dwellers we have today, without whom great technology and great weapons are impossible, and you need cities, even if city dwellers like the mayan priests are held by the balls on the food supply issue by the farmers. But you get what I'm trying to say. Fuck the economy, and I don't have to work or buy anything unless it's a good deal, and that's the only way to ensure fair prices. Mandatory sewer bills, mandatory electric bills, mandatory grocery prices are open to abuse in cities, and might require government regulation of monopolies just like in the old days. I used to get like $17 gas bills 7 years ago, when the local gas company was regulated, and now that they have been deregulated, and got all the city dwellers by the balls, they started charging a 25/mo minimum charge. 25/mo for nothing? You're out of your mind, that's an insane amount of money, not in the $25/hr for a GED union wage economy of the 90's, or even to the $30/hr nurses blackmailing people out of their livesavings they gathered for 40 years within 10 minutes, which they are willing to turn over to get a heart surgery and live for 2 more minutes, so that has a good and a bad side to it, but with the level of unemployment, and businesses going empty all around me, 25/hr is insane, in the present general circumstances, and all I can do is give the the finger if they are unwilling to be flexible on charges to me, such as when I don't have money, I could still spend $5/mo for hot water and not heat the home much, instead of all or nothing 25/mo, in which case they get nothing, or a crash like Detroit is coming their and the whole US economy's way. Life adapts to new circumstances, and if it cannot, it goes extinct. Businesses and economies adapt and if not they do not, they go extinct too. And in this adaptation game my way of fighting Da Man on top constantly seeking to put a collar around my neck and a chain to yank on, threatening me with this, threatening me with that, is to give Da Man the finger and tell him to give me liberty or give me death, and when the circumstances around me are artificially modulated to create an incentive to make me do something I hate doing, like becoming an intellectual property slave to some intellectual property generation company slave owner, I go head against the wall and make sure that the opposite effect is achieved, as far as my behavior is concerned. I'm like a cat that you try to put a yoke on, I throw it off and hiss at you, but if you set me free and I feel free, I might come rub up against you and purr to you. Above anything else I don't breed in captivity, and willingly go extinct in circumstances of captivity, such as a 1.002 income to expense ratio. Give me liberty or give me death, and in that I don't need you to give me a high income, but I'd love to divide by zero to create infinite luxury on peanuts of an income. My goal is not a high salary, but a zero cost, in the long run. And nothing can change that.

I'm sick, income to expense ratio is too low in America for businesses to be profitable, and when I try to fix my expense to create a division by zero infinite luxury condition for myself on minimum wage, I get attacked by the people who have a lot of wealth and their life savings or even decades long education and experience presently invested into those cost of living things - i.e. utility companies and utility stocks, real estate investments, intellectual property investments, insurance businesses, legal services and healthcare services, or even food - and are extremely vehement when you talk about DIY in everything above, including legal, health, housing, utility, food, you DIY everything and have zero bills except property tax which you cannot escape, other than living in the most worthless and piece of crap place nobody else wants to live in, yet there is plenty of green and plenty of rain and life you can eat. Food is my top daily necessity, besides air and water that I get for near free, they fall out of the sky, but no biblical manna falls out of the sky and I cannot live without food, and everything else is optional, or not a daily cost - like you build a shelter once, it takes you a couple days or maybe months then it's good for 30 years. I don't understand how the shelter cost is so friggin high? It's only so because of corrupt bldg code sustaining the artificially high prices attacks low cost shelters to cater to the favors of those on top, who tend to hold most property possessions, and it's in their interest to distort laws in their own favor. All I know stubbornness like that only leads to a Detroitish appearance world. Unless they are willing to erect skyhigh tariffs on international trade to where artificially high labor prices can be maintained within the US, and from that artificially high cost of living prices, we have to compete for our own dollar with Chinese engineers earning 3K a year, when minimum wage of approx 8/hr comes to 8 x 2080hrs/yr approx 16K salaries. And people in America think that we're better than the rest of the world, that Chinese people are stupid because they don't know the American Way and can't speak English correctly - why don't you try learning Chinese and see how far you get or how stupid you are too - and all I can say is that they are not stupid, and the American Way is shopping at Walmart for stuff Made in China, and everyone works at companies in the US making products nobody can afford to buy. Unlike in the days of Ford T-model assembly lines, where the workers got paid enough to buy the products they were making, or even in the 90's when 25/hr GED union jobs could let people not really care because money was plenty, these days, when I work on a Toyota part at a job, the company owner has a meeting and orders or strongly suggests everyone to buy a Corolla and credit. Let's use our credit to buy Corollas. Yeah right, nobody has $20K for a new Corolla and they buy used cars. If you want a global economy without tariffs which has lots of benefits, you have to be willing to compete, and in that, on the cost of labor, and in that, on the cost of living. If you are unwilling to adapt your cost of living, such as housing cost to the economic realities, you create an all or nothing crash situation, like Detroit buildings going empty. The only thing those buildings failed to do properly is adjust their free market prices. Such as if nobody wants to pay 1500/mo for an office space you drop it to 500, and if nobody pays that, I'm sure people would be interested at 50, and in turn the building property has to adjust their cost of living expenses too. It's like I can't find a way to exist in the US making 7.85/hr if the cost of living takes 7.83/hr and I'm left with 0.02 wiggle room, or the income to expense ratio is 7.85/7.83=1.0026, with a 0.2% excess I can use to save up money from, and compete like that with China where people make $1/day, not 14 hr workdays x 7.85/hr. It's like if I can cut all my expenses to zero, or close to it, so say $0.10/hr while making $7.85/hr, I'd be in ecstasy, living like no king ever lived before, with an income to expense ratio of 7.85/0.10=78.5, or 7750% excess which I can save up from, meaning each month I can save near 77 months worth of basic costs, and in 2 months that's 154 mos ahead into the future that are covered, and I can start undertaking some longterm vision goals, such as starting a family and raising children without government aid, which I cannot do when in the pinch of 1.002 income to expense ratio barely able to take care of one person, let alone a stay at home wife and 2.1 kids, which comes to 4.1 people. If the wife works too and get free health care from grandparents, then each has to do 2.05 excess above themselves. But in this sense, if I could get my cost of living to $0.10/day, you could pay me $0.50/day and I'd be working with a 5x income to expense ratio, each month able to create a 4x surplus, which is able to take care of the 1 wife plus 2.1 kids=3.1 people easily, leaving 0.9 people's worth as excess luxury for vacations and shit. So in this seeking luxury, or even seeking to propagate life and have a family, it's difficult to attack it at the 5x minimum wage front, trying to earn 5 x 7.85 = 39.25/hr instead of minimum wage of 7.85/hr to be able to take care of a family other than just all by myself, and it's a lot easier to attack it on the front of the seeking to become a self reliant independent yeoman farmer, who was supposed to be the backbone of democracy, and in that build your own house with your two hands instead of hiring contractors who want 100K to build one, whatever you can put together, and that means giving the finger to contractors and banks, grow your own food, giving the finger to grocery stores, make your own electric via solar and windmill or grow your own fuel, and collect your own rainwater or dig your own well and outhouse and sewer system, giving the finger to all utility companies like the electric company, gas company or the city sewer system sending you random arbitrary bills, also doing your own self representation in court, giving the finger to lawyers, so in all this global competition I could give the finger to the Chinese working for $1/day and screw them out of their job by me working for 50 cents a day, while still having a 5x income to expense ratio where I do everything else myself, instead of being abused by these bill composing agencies living in a dream world, of, let me see if I can come up with a bill with numbers I pick out of thin air, and see if you can pay it, and send it to you, threatening you with a bad credit if you don't, and loss of the roof over your head when your credit goes to shit and the bank increases the mortgage interest rate into the starry sky and you're fucked, homeless out on the street because you can no longer pay your slavery tribute fees to them. So instead of a healthy vibrant competitive US economy, we have an Uncle Sam pays everyone's bills by starting up the money printing presses and sending everyone a government welfare or unemployment check, and usually such a behavior without value backing that printed paper leads to an instant collapse and hyperinflation, like the Zimbabwe Z$ did collapse recently after going through valuations with so many zeros that ATM machines choked on it, like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 initial Z$ dollars you had to have saved up to be worth 1 Z$ 10 years later to buy a loaf of bread. So the US is lucky that the US$ is still the global currency, and we can abuse our privilege that even if we just print the money and send it to everyone, so we can sustain our artificially high lawyer prices, real estate prices, and utility prices, and the consequence is this remote abstract slavery where the Chinese toil away in their factories, underwriting a lot of value for our money, while we print that money and buy the Chinese goods on it, but it creates a lot of abrasion, ill will and anger, including all the cat-hissing messages coming from Pyongyang. In my mine Pyongyang is Chinas dummy puppet China can use to throat talk because they'd look silly talking like that from Beijing, wielding nukes at us. But the consequence of international abstract remote slavery based on the US$ being the global currency and abused in the printing money way, is that there is either a fight and a war over it, or it stops being the global currency, like the British pound stopped being the global currency after the monarchy sort of collapsed away from being a dominant world power. Even if we out competed China in the labor market by working for 50 cents a day for our own dollar to them doing it at $1/day, and them suffering from it, and possibly attacking, it would be a more acceptable and fair way to do it then simply printing our money and receiving it as a welfare check sitting home not working. If anything, I'd be willing to work for the same average wage of $1/day as they do, and then compete like that on other things, so there is no anger generated over that, so that inequality, either above or under, is not used as an excuse to create a war, or even just mountain lion stuck in a game trapper's rig hissing messages. Money schmoney, I don't really care what the prices and hourly wages are, all I know is I'm not interested in working for $40/hr if my cost of living expenses total to $41/hr, but I'd be very interested in making 50 cents a day if my cost of living expenses totaled 10 cents a day, giving me a 4x wiggle room to work with. And Obamacare or other mandatory bills like a mandatory gas bill do nothing to help with this picture, and I'm sorry, but I simply refuse to buy it, and they can take the penalty for it, which I will wear proudly on my tax records.