Why do I suddenly want to play Kerble Space program?

I've stood in the middle of a long unmown wheatfield as baby wild boar played all around my ankles, licked my boots, and even stretched up to sniff my kneecaps, and the whole dozen of them looked rather well fed beneath that black bristly hair they had. Mama looke pretty well fed for a wild creature too, 15 feet away, and close to 230 lbs. I had both an M-16 and a 45 at the time, and no intention what-so-ever of shooting mama unless I absolutely had to try, because I would bet it would take at least 3 rounds to stop her, but I can assure you, she was quite likely to survive in the absence of humans, and maybe even in their presence, while my own survival seemed to just possibly hinge on not stepping on junior's trotters. (Me, I wasn't there to hunt boar, rather venomous snakes, which were spreading away from a nearby dam project as the waters rose.).
            Equally likely, every wild boar in the continental USA is descended from a domestic pig. These were brought over by Columbus, De Soto and De la Salle. The earliest escape or release of an actual European wild boar in the USA was probably not until the early 20th century, so all boar mentioned by such people as Crockett and Lewis and Clark are presumably descended from escaped domestic pigs.Turning a pig back into a boar is not a matter of generations of selective breeding, but a matter of an escaped one surviving for the first six months or so. They are currently wild in at least 36 states and the numbers are growing, with popualtion totals estimated at around 500,000, and several states that have them are considering broadening their hunting seasons or bag limits, if any. It is actually illegal to kill a boar in some jurisdictions unless you ritually chant "Oh My Ghod, it's A-Chargin!!!." first. Unlike just about every other invasive species, they do not taste like chicken. My guess is without human culling, they would level out at upwards of a million population in the US.

Would you initaite interspecies contact with a species that wonders whether you go with white wine or red? Would you invade a world where the inhabitants are as likely to reach for a jar of brown sauce as a weapon? Omnivorism - keeping Earth first contact free for over 500,000 years.

Obligatory - "A moose ate my sister..."

Because the air traffic controllers were unskilled labor in your world?

Google's chief way of restricting adult search terms is to deactivate autocomplete, so their engine will suddenly stop suggesting anything as the user types in certain cases. You can see this by slowly typing in "Linda Lovelace" - at some point the engine will be suggesting terms like "Luna Lovegood" that assume you may have misspelled something, but simply won't take the logical guess as you get closer to the end. This is not a system that is constantly updated with every new name in porn or every adult website, by any means, and Google relies a lot on websites self identifying. Hard core sites usually do, merely nude sites often don't bother to make it easier for the Google spiders.

I'm going to claim there's prior art on that cubic water thing. I have several copies of a device that produces cubic water in dozen lots, in the bottom of my refrigerator.

Probably, it's more like the reason Kurt Vonnegut did the same thing. Slaughterhouse Five, for just one of his works, really needs to be read like the reader isn't allowed to be sure whether Billy Pilgrim is objectively experiencing being unstuck in time and meeting Tralfamadorians and such, or has become a trifle unglued coping with tremendous shell-shock from WW2. If it comes prelabeled as SF, the deliberate ambiguity is ruined. Wondering if Tralfamadorian anatomy makes sense for a realistic alien is not even close to the biggest points Vonnegut hoped people would take away from Slaughterhouse Five.
              Even Heinlein, who didn't usually mind being called things like the "number one Science Fiction author ever" and such, had cases like this - Glory Road deliberately switches at the very end from Fantasy tropes to SF, and Stranger in a Strange Land exists in two published forms, one more clearly SF, one deliberately deemphasizing those elements.

"There is no purpose to manned spaceflight. The scientific return comes from unmanned spaceflight."

You are currently modded +4 Insightful for having claimed, essentially, that the HST repair and upgrade missions could have all been done by unmanned systems. I have points, I could have modded you as you deserve. I could just ask for a citation - you're making an extraordinary claim there and you really do deserve to have to back it up or retract it. Instead, I'm taking a couple of months vacation from Slashdot - there's too many like you around - the signal to noise ratio keeps dropping towards an absolute zero, and I join all the 3 digit old farts in saying "This site just ain't what it used to be!" .

Halo was really based in the same universe (or a very similar one) as an earlier series of games usually called the Marathon trilogy. These were Bungie's first big hits, and had two major properties that make them remembered fondly.

1. They were like Doom (2 1/2 D shooters), but with great plots and characterization for their time. (And most of this keenness was something more players saw there for the first time, often before Doom came out, or at least caught on, because Apples were around more then- see point 2). Bungie may have been first with some features, was definitely first to get them right with others, and it took some time for Id games to even be taken seriously. Think of the story everybody wanted for Mass Effect 3, and mostly felt disappointed in. For most gamers who started the series, Marathon 3 was like everything more modern players hoped Mass Effect 3 would be. Plus, many players felt they got a lot of other things right, like squad level control, vehicle movement, microphone talk in multiplayer, weapons/ammo ratios (and not being able to carry 10 or so weapons and thousands of rounds of ammo all at once), being able to design your own levels, and the whole blend of Single Player/Multiplayer/Deathmatch modes.
2. They ran on Apples, and were so big there that many people actually complained about how there was notihng in gaming for the PC as good as for the Apple. (There were other games, such as Myst and Armor Alley contributing to this effect too, I'm not saying it was all Marathon, but Myst and Bungie doing ports to Microsoft shifted the whole gaming scene away from Apple over just a couple of years).

Halo was supposed to be the updated version of those, going to a fully 3D engine, and it delivered an really exciting story with a giant ring around a planet, a weapon that could destroy whole worlds, and A.I. systems that would burn themselves out in 3 years or so just through being so ubersmart (and you had to hope the one you were relying on got you through the next scenario before it popped). And for the first time, there was a version for the X-Box and you didn't ahve to have an Apple Mac!

Tetraethyl Lead was used in automotive fuel from the 1920s through much of the 70s, and is still used in some aviation fuel. There appears to be illegal manufacture and use of the substance ongoing in the PRC. The amounts involved as a fuel antiknock ingredient exceed Lead's use in mold control and paint, and should be considered the primary source for increased Lead in the environment..

And you were present to see this but didn't call an ambulance?
There are some forms of heavy metal exposure that produce such symptoms and have near instantanious onsets. One account of such concerns a french soldier who poured and drank about 250 ml of wine passed through a 155 mm artillery piece barrel as part of a unit induction ceremony, and picked up a substantial Tungsten exposure. He had immediate onset of symptoms including seizures and rapid unconsiousness. All the symptoms mentioned by the parent poster are recognized for acute inhalation exposure to Mercury, but I'm running into paywalls trying to find out just how rapid their onset can be. Still the AC who generalized that heavy metal poisoning does not work that way is simply wrong, and is probably not picking up on the differences between gradual and rapid exposure, or inhalation vs ingestion, or both.

And about your sig: You'll take your insight where you find it, like everybody else. and you'll like it!

Ah, I had thought the claim was to have a more specifically identifiable form of DNA, without that, this can only be considered a minor bit of evidence for one suspect. I still say we don't even have that for several of the others, but this is not really conclusive.

I really doubt the claim that in the victorian era, Poland was literally flooded by jews. Figuratively, maybe, but I do not think that word 'literally' means what you think it means.

It's the previous DNA analysis that was based on just mitochondrial DNA - This one isn't. It's based on what is allegedly a new improvement in DNA testing, but it involves testing conventional nuclear DNA. Also, given the rest of Kosminski's history, if he was, say, merely a pimp who was wounded at the same time as the death of one of his prostitutes, his subsequent behavior was rather unlikely, to say the least. He was suspected of being Jack while he still lived. I don't know about you, but if the police were looking into the possibility I was Jack the Ripper, and the real Jack had tried to kill me, then proving my own innocence by giving them information that might lead to the real killer looks a lot more rational than shutting up about it. It's pretty much killing two birds with one stone at that point. (As opposed to Jack's method of killing birds, I guess). There are people pointing to K's mental illness history, and how he might not be particulalry rational, but there's a big difference between saying someone is mentally ill, and saying, they were mentally ill, and it was definitely in a way that would make them not do what most people would do here, but definiitely also not in a way that would make them commit murder either.
        People taking the other side have to either beleive this new evidence isn't a real improvement in genetic testing and that claim is essentially false (which is fine by me if they do - time will settle whether it is or isn't), or they have to make some pretty bizarre and often self contradictory claims about the few other items of evidence we have, such as claiming Kosminski was a real bad apple who the police wanted enough for very serious crimes (just what, they never wrote down), that he couldn't have whitewashed his own reputation even by giving them Jack, or that Kosminski had some major underworld contacts who would have paniced if he had gone to the police (but these contacts couldn't take care of the Ripper if Kosminski went to them instead). ,
    Other such evidence that has to be tweaked is there are some good sketches of the crime scenes, and for this one Jack had to, for example, fight Kosminski only in places where it was too dark to see his face, then kill the prostitute and move her body indoors past some well lighted areas without K hanging around to see who the real Jack was, and do it all quickly enough that the real Jack could get out of there before K could have returned with the police. (Or somehow, the real Jack had to know K was not the type to return with police, or something else both odd and very much not in evidence.).
            There's also the claim which has been around for decades, that the word Jewes in the grafitti scrawled at one crime scene has to refer to some Masonic ritual and not be a misspellling of Jews, and other such things which have always been oddish speculations, but had better be taken as basic assumptions to make it less likely that K did it - people who seriously want to claim there's no other evidence than this 'questionable' DNA test to link Kosminski will just about have to buy into one or another of these oddish assumptions like the "It had to be a Mason" bit, as well. People willing to go down such roads usually end up "proving' that jack was Queen Victoria, or the Loch Ness Monster, or other such candidates.