Remember that in the early days of penicillin, when manufacturing meant making a couple of grams of the stuff, it was 'recycled' from patient's urine, purified and used again. Many drugs are passed unchanged through the kidney. Many more have only modest changes that might still be biologically active. Standard sewage treatment plants have a relatively haphazard approach to breaking down complex organic molecules of all sorts. If the primary bacteria and flocculation (precipitation) don't get the compound it goes into the drink (so to speak).

UV radiation is pretty good at breaking down things, and even atmospheric radiation (without adding additional UV lights) works to some extent but it is slow and the UV does not penetrate any great deal into the water column. So you either need active UV filtering (something the EPA is pushing) or some other active means of removing organochemicals. Add industrial level effluents and you've got a problem. All of this requires money, time, rule of law and civil commitment. Which means it doesn't always happen - either in China or India or anywhere.

Yeah, Kim's Killer Kids could conceivably make the elevator ascend in bumpy six inch steps for an hour while playing 'You Light Up My Life", but that's about as scary as it gets.

No stop this. You can fix that aberrant behavior with a simple preference switch. Which I did immediately, but my wife LIKES the fact she can search for 'everything' in one place. No accounting for taste.

The visuals - a wash and always subjective. The bugs are there and won't be fixed until 10.5.

Then, OS X 10.5-10.7 will be great and 11 (or whatever the hell they are planning on calling) it will arrive, be full of bugs and questionable UI changes. And the Wheel of Time....

Come now, who cares what politicians do these days? We have Miley and Justin to push the edge of what is compatible with human behavior. Not to mention the Rolling Stones, Kim Kardashian and Kiss.

The days of 'the only way I could lose the election is to be found in bed with a dead girl or live boy' are over.

I suppose we have the Internet to thank for that.....

This really isn't fair. You need to fess up and tell us what meds you're on.

Oh yeah? Explain George Bush.

There is corruption of one sort or another everywhere. Most 'functional' countries manage to keep it down to a level where the rest of society functions to some level. In the US, people are routinely tossed into courts over bribery and corruption issues. The Navy is running a big anticorruption scandal at the moment. Of course, some (or perhaps most) of the perpetrators get away - but enough get caught to keep the system functioning.

In a number of African and Middle Eastern countries and likely including Russia at this point, the rule of law is so feeble an distant that overt corruption, nepotism and just outright theft are the rules of the game.

Don't knock the judicial system too hard. It serves as a strong barrier to this sort of thing.

Google doesn't need anymore money, thank you very much. It's fine that they 'waste' it on research. Much like ol Elon.

Nonetheless, I think they need to think about doing something with less potential for serious problems. I found the phrase

To be the scariest thing I've read all day. It did that by parsing YouTube. That was the first attempt to parse YouTube with 'Deep Learning".

I do not want to be around when it finally figures out about 4Chan.

If everybody hadn't got all of their panties in a bunch, they would have filtered your spam, backed up your hard drive, kept permanent records of your phone calls, your tax returns and every text you've ever made.

All for free (well, not exactly free but at least 'No Extra Cost').

I swear, Americans are just so jumpy these days. No good deed goes unpunished.

You're supposed to say "Allah Akbar". Your keywords flag you as a paranoid schizophrenic or Slashdot aficionado. Either one mostly harmless to the Three Letter Agencies.

As opposed to giant cities, garbage dumps, plastic in ocean sediments, weird chemicals in land and ocean sediments, carbon dioxide, aircraft carriers, AOL disks?

This. This (or shortly thereafter) was when homo sapiens started significantly altering the ecology of the planet.

Now the nuclear age may introduce a specific inflection in the Anthropocene but so did the widespread burning of coal (the 'Industrial Revolution'). Just starting at ground zero, so to speak, seems really arbitrary.

Perhaps millions of years from now when the Anthropocene layers are a few meters thick it might make sense to start dating from the beginning of widespread man man isotopes, but if there are anything resembling archeologists around at that time they will have found plenty of other bits of 'civilization' in that rubble.

You sound like my niece.

Simple experiment:

Take an empty refrigerator, cool it down for, say 24 hours. Watch the temp stabilize. For bonus points, put a recorder on the temp probe and watch it go up and down (the deadband that DamonHD is talking about).

Now, turn the power off for 5minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, several hours.

You will notice that at short time frames there will be very little temperature excursion, basically within the deadband. Certainly, longer times of no power are going to affect the temperature but no one is talking about hours of power delay - more like minutes.

Even small, 'dorm sized' refrigerators that we use for storing vaccines (and likewise have to be kept within a +/- 3C temp band and monitored to prove it) can handle 30 minute cycles (if you don't open the door). I would imagine a larger fridge would hold for at least 15 minutes even with occasional door opening. But you could certainly check it out, look at potential power savings and decide if the system did what you want.

FWIW a typical home refrigerator will hold temps within the safety range of most foods for AT LEAST 4 hours, a deep freezer for 24 to 48 hours.

I'm always impressed that so many professional engineers hate ACs so much that they would create a system just to upset them.