I take it that Appy was not 'appy with your request?

Thank you, that's a very interesting article. The letter of reply is also informative. Lest readers believe that the fact that nicotine is present in some vegetables may somehow compare to the serious dangers of smoking, he indicates that the calculations presented regarding an "environment with minimal smoke" described by the author of the article actually amounts to "the equivalent of 1 percent of the smoke from one puff of a cigarette", hardly what most of us would consider "low amounts of smoke in a room":

Finally, it has been well confirmed that the exposure to tobacco smoke indicated by a plasma concentration of 5 to 10 ng of cotinine per milliliter is of clear toxicologic importance,3 whereas there is no evidence that daily exposure to the equivalent of 1 percent of the smoke from one puff of a cigarette would be of toxicologic importance or could possibly confound assessment of environmental exposure.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199308053290619#t=letters

Malware gets changed over time but here's a video from Sophos named "Watch CryptoLocker in action":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz2kmmsMpMI

Looks like it just encrypts whatever it can right away, not a little today, a little more tomorrow.

Well, there's speculation that at least one of the twelve was himself Muslim (based on his name, "Ahmed Merabet"):

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/08/ahmed-merabet-mourned-charlie-hebdo-paris-attack

My point remains: courage is to be found throughout humankind, as is tyranny unfortunately.

(Not that Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi and Abu Qatada are "moderates" though. They favor al Zawahiri of al Queda.)

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2014/02/pro-al_qaeda_saudi_c.php

OK, here's a recent article about a US lawyer who has friends in ISIS and was negotiating with them for the release of a hostage, the American aid worker Peter Kassig who was ultimately murdered by ISIS. The terms of the proposed hostage release:

If consummated, the negotiations in which Cohen was involved would have included an agreement by ISIS to halt all kidnappings and beheadings of civilians; in exchange for this, Maqdisi and Abu Qatada, another widely respected jihadist theologian, would have agreed to cease and desist their scathing public denunciations of ISIS.

Citation:

http://forward.com/articles/211631/stanley-cohens-radical-detour-on-the-way-to-prison/?p=all

So yeah, there are some influential Muslims who speak out, but you know, they can get murdered also for doing so. How many non-Muslim people do you know who will open themselves up to terrorist attack to speak out against injustice?

Courage is in short supply in this world no matter the religious affiliation, ethnic group, skin color, etc.

Poor fellow. My best advice to you: Do not go to France!

In fact I received a call from an unknown number (that Google later showed as belonging to a local hospital) and the caller did not leave any message. A few days later someone called again and did leave voicemail telling me that a very good, old, friend was in the hospital and had left my phone number as a contact. He died several hours later.

While responding to the initial call would almost certainly have made no difference to my friend's survival, I wish that I had been alerted sooner. Just a "this is Dr. X calling about Mr. Y" would have been fine (and in fact was the content of the voicemail left in the second call).

When I got called, after they had me do some cool shit on my never-before-used Windows VM, the payoff was that they wanted me to purchase their tech support and software via credit card through one of at least a few online payment processors; we burned through three or four of them with my "bad" credit card numbers; finally they caught on to my scam.

So I don't think it's that they are looking for Command and Control nodes but just plain old fast cash. The prices for their tech support varied from around $300 down to around $200 or so after I balked at paying so much to fix my computer instead of just throwing it away and buying another.

It would be the same thing only if the postal service derived its revenue from junk mail.

They don't, so it's not the same thing at all.

Ha ha. Joke's on you. The USPS makes its living delivering junk mail.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/business/seeking-revenue-postal-service-plans-to-deliver-more-junk-mail.html

Nah You'll be fine.. At least in NYC you almost certainly won't be given a traffic ticket, let alone be charged with a crime.

http://gothamist.com/2012/02/15/heres_why_drivers_get_away_with_mur.php

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/05/michael-mckean-hit-by-car-nyc-no-criminality-suspected.html

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/1837/

For one thing, Chimps can't offer any definition of "person" at all, let alone explain why they would be included in it.

I wouldn't be so sure about that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washoe_(chimpanzee)

However you might not be able to understand what the chimpanzee was trying to say to you. That could be an inadequacy on your part.

Oops. That should be 397 miles, I originally calculated going from 75 to 85, not from 70 to 85. Maybe he means he'd save one hour on the round trip time, 1/2 hour each way.

Does Scott Sales provide the route he took between the "Brakken oil patch" and Bozeman? Because Billings, MT to Bozeman, MT is only 142 miles apart according to Google Maps, which lists the travel time as 2 hr 11 min.

He'd have to drive 637 miles before he'd "save an hour" going 85 instead of 70.

"I have a gum."