Even if we stipulate, for the sake of argument, that some criminal did break into his home in this manner, that leaves us the obvious question of why the fuck wasn't anything taken? Thieves takes things, that's pretty much the definition! Whoever broke in could have taken all of his valuables, but didn't. Ergo, he, she or they weren't interested in valuables.

Then there is the fact that it would appear that some care was taken to leave minimal traces of the illicit visit. Again, this is not the behaviour of your typical burglar. B&E guys know that most of the time cops won't bother with the whole forensic fingerprints, DNA analysis etcetera. As long as they don't leave clear prints in obvious places, the cops will usually just file a report and move on. It is just not cost effective to spend tens of thousands of department funds to pursue your typical B&E.

The only logical conclusions we can make here is that:

a) The perpetrator(s) were far more skilled and patient than your average burglar

b) They weren't after fence-able valuables

c) They were interested in something they thought he had that none of his neighbours had.

d) Based on the access to his computers, what they were interested in was electronic data of some sort.

e) Given his long standing political views, he may have been investigated by the German intelligence community on general principles, but given his well known connection to Edward Snowden, it is highly probable that he was being investigated by someone with a strong interest in that situation.

f) Virtually all of the groups with access to people with those skills and with a strong interest in the Snowden case are state actors, mostly in the covert community.

I'll concede that there is a small chance that some private sector group might be involved with this. There may be a group on the scale of Anonymous that also acts on the real world/physical level and is (therefore) more paranoid about associating themselves with any actions. One could hypothesize that such a group was looking for data so that they could reach out and help Snowden with his agenda without leaving any clues for other agencies to follow as to how they found him, but I think that is a very low probability. (it would make for a great plot for some cyberpunk novel though wouldn't it?)

Seriously though, You're still voting in favour of:

1) larger default text

2) huuuuuuuuge amounts of whitespace (which we are cynically certain will become ad space as soon as it's out of beta)

3) useless stock photos whose sole purpose are eye magnets

4) a photo-mosaic approach to summarizing the top stories in the default view. (I'm sure anyone with vision issues is gonna hate this)

5) Crippling the nested/threaded comment system. Which; as many have pointed out, is an important, I dare say critical and fundamental component of /.

6) More obvious whoring out to social media venues, a phenomenon which a rather large and vocal portion of us hate and bash at every opportunity. (C'mon Soulskill, do you really think many of us are going to link to here on Facebook? And even if we did, would you *want* the kind of yammerheads you'd catch casting a net in those waters?)

7) an overall marketing and packaging approach more suited to a glossy magazine than a salon where the articles are stimulators for lively conversation, debate and even outright arguing over by a self selected group of reasonably intelligent people. (trolls notwithstanding) Shallow glitz over actual content.

...and that's not a good thing....

1) Sure, life can survive in some pretty inhospitable environments, but can it arise in those environments? As i understand it, life as we know it arose in comparatively benign, even ideal conditions for the chemistry to work out well. Only after literally billions of years did life manage to evolve the ability to exist in the extreme environments we are just beginning to study and understand today. Saline geysers, black smokers and deep arctic boulders all apparently got colonized slowly over time by lifeforms that could handle just a bit more of the extreme condition(s) than its competitors. Step by step until they had evolved so far from the original environment it could no longer go back.

2) Sure, our probes and such could be contaminated by earthly microflora, but what are the odds that anything that could live in the shirtsleeve environment of a space vehicle assembly would also be able to survive long enough to reproduce at all in the environments we send them to? Europa has a surface temp of something like MINUS 160 Celsius. IIRC, the coldest ever recorded on Earth was like -90C. I'm not a chemist, but it seems to me that being in an environment where carbon chemistry flat out can't work because the environment is too cold is far more of a showstopper than the radiation level, aridity/liquidity, salinity or metallicity of the landing area. Can carbon based stereochemical reactions even occur at those sorts of low temperatures? IIRC, most of the possible alternative elemental bases for life chemistry, like sulfur and silianes require significant *higher* temperatures than anything carbon based could survive, so we are't likely to find any of those on Europa either.

Worse yet is the fact that, in academic publications, it's not the opinion of the authors that matters, nor is it, to a lessor extent, the opinion of the authors peers in that discipline that matters either. As others her have pointed out, publication is important for two reasons beyond the academic consideration of advancing the field. Being published in say Nature, matters for tenure and grant applications as well. It's the presitige of the publication of non-academics in the academic field that matters for those issues. You not only have to convince Professor Steamhead of the integrity of your Open publication, but convince the Dean of Steamology that a) Example Journal is as good prestige wise as Nature and b) This fact is already well established in that field, so all the other deans and grant board chairmen know this too.,/i>

THAT is the hard thing to establish, the near universal understanding and presumption that new and shiny Open Journal for Steamology is just as good as Proceedings of the Royal Society for Steamology which has been publishing for over 80 years.

1) how you generate the requirements for a medical device, the brainstorming period before you start actually working on materials 2) How you test a material for a particular application, why cobalt alloys might be used for a particular implant rather than titanium or surgical stainless steel. 3) Your projects are the kind of thing we hear about a few years down the road when device X gets approval for human applications, you could give us a sneak peek (intellectual property restrictions permitting) of the sort of thing you are working on now that mght be approved for human use in the near future. 4) Obviously most of your materials are valuable enough that you do a fair bit of waste recovery, but I imagine you or some of your employees still manage to come up with nifty little doo-dads out of scrap pieces. Cobalt alloys make for real pretty jewellry pieces. 5) what's the machiniblilty of alloys like vitallium like? Do you see any medical applications for stuff like metallic micro-lattice, aerogel or aerographite? 6) What device were you looking at that boralyn for? There's a surprising paucity of info on that alloy, mostly related to a single company's bike frame. 7) I think your shop would be interesting, but you say that there are other amazing shops out there, can you point us to some of them?

What vlm was saying is that the low weight and high strength of titanium makes it feasible (on paper) to create a thin foil sphere of titanium that encloses a vacuum, but such a structure would be so close to failure that it wouldn't be practical to construct it, even the lightest touch would cause the sphere to collapse.

(it occurs to me that even if you *could* build such a structure, it wouldn't contain a vacuum for very long anyway, as hydrogen and possibly helium would migrate through the foil and fill the void, negating any increase in lift the vacuum had provided)