They try to spin it as so malicious, including:

This is at least the second time a U.S. warrant has been served at Google for data from someone connected to WikiLeaks. A sealed warrant was served to Google in 2011 for the email of a WikiLeaks volunteer in Iceland.

Right, it's not like they had any probable cause of illegal activity back in 2011, no sirree.... You've got a Wikileaks volunteer who was at the time acting as an unofficial spokeman for the organization in the news, voluntarily coming up to them and telling them that Assange is working with Anonymous and LulzSec and ordering hacks and spying, including against US targets, and providing troves of data - are they supposed to just ignore that?

A lot of people think that by joining and taking up a civilian-ish MOS, they're not actually in any danger. Which is simply not true. I had, for example, a friend who joined up for a job doing lab biopsies of medical samples. Figured he'd always be stateside. Then the Iraq War broke out and they simply reclassified his whole unit as field medics and send them over to a FOB near Fallujah.

If you're in the military and they decide they need more people on the front lines, it doesn't matter what your MOS is, you're "draft pick" #1.

Except that's not true. You're referring to the contrapositive, but the contrapositive would be:

If 1) blue whales are not fluent in Swahili, then 2) this post was not written in Iceland and 3) this post was written in Iceland.

Applying the logic above: For it to be false that #2 and #3 follow from #1, there must exist at least one case where the #1 is true but #2 and #3 are not. Included in that requirement is therefore the requirement that there must be at least one case where the first requirement true.

So show me a swahili-speaking blue whale and I'll give your argument credence ;)

Also, saying "therefore the reasoning is invalid" - the reasoning above can be formalized using the standard rules of logic. Hence that would be arguing that logic itself is invalid ;)

With any two contradictory premises you can prove any unrelated third premise. Example:

If 1) this post was written in Iceland, and 2) this post was not written in Iceland, then 3) blue whales are fluent in Swahili.

For it to be false that the third premise follows from the first two, there must exists at least one case where the first two premises are true but the third one is not. Included in that requirement is therefore the requirement that there must be at least one case where the first two premises are true. Since they are contradictory, this cannot occur, and thus cannot be a case where the first two are true and the third is false. Thus the third premise follows from the first two.

You can do weird things with logic like that. One of my favorites is, "In any bar where there are people who may or may not be drinking, there will always exist at least one person who, if he is drinking, everyone else in the bar is drinking".

Which sounds ridiculous. But you have two possibilities: either everyone is drinking, or there's at least one person who's not drinking. If everyone is drinking, then your "one person" can be any of them. If not everyone is drinking, you can pick any one person who isn't drinking to be your "one person". Since the statement has a premise "If he is drinking" - that premise immediately fails, and so there is no requirement in the rules of logic that the second part "everyone else in the bar is drinking" must hold.

It's a logically consistent statement, but breaks the expectations of conversational language. A reader naturally wants to interpret it as meaning that there's going to be a person who, if he suddenly decides to start drinking, then everyone in the bar is going to suddenly pick up a glass and start drinking. But the statement in its basest form doesn't claim that, it is only a description of a moment of time and requires no consistency on who does what between different time periods.

The future of Apple depends entirely on one thing: trends.

Why is it that so many kids put "iPhone" on their Christmas list and not any sort of Android phone? It's because their friends all have one. It's cool. It's stylish. That's great for Apple, it's a captive market - iPhones could be a year's tech behind android for double the price, and they'll still continue to sell like hotcakes so long as they maintain that.

But trends change. How long can Apple maintain a position in the forefront on this? Beats me. But I doubt it's going to be forever. And if they ever lose the "trendy" edge to someone else, they're going to have to compete soley based on tech and price.

Completely dying is one thing, but heading on a clear and irreversible decline, or transitioning from an innovation company to a company with a steady, roughly fixed income stream is a lot more common.

To be really vague about what's going to happen in the next 10 years:

--------------
There's going to be some out of left field killer apps for various platforms; out of left field new hardware; and especially combinations thereof. In some cases it will be established players that capitalize on the new must-haves, but in other case it'll be brand new players that rise from nothing to become giants. Many others on the sidelines who missed the trend will rush in and and try to snipe off market share. Few will be effective, at least in the short term.

A few new greedy bastards who we love to hate will take the stage. We'll cheer as some established names go down. We'll mourn the cases where a good product dies to an inferior one due to inferior marketing strategy, managerial incompetence, and/or scummy tactics on behalf of competitors.

And all the while we'll get lots of fun new toys that change our lives in ways from the subtle to the transformative. :)
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The ruble retracted its december losses (but only its december losses) by the central bank:

1) Throwing the Russian economy to the wolves, via raising the prime rate to a staggering 17%
2) Starting a new wave of dumping massive quantities of their reserve funds onto the open market, hastening the funds' demise
3) Forcing exporters to swap their foreign currency for rubles, thus putting them at greater risk for defaulting on their foreign debts

How long do you think *any* of these can last, much less all three?

You took too long to post, it's up to 79 sextillion now. No wait, 80.

Even if one wanted to do a misdirection about Christmas in a tweet, there are tons more offensive targets one could have chosen related to 25 december:

  * The Malkh festival formerly practiced by the peoples of present-day Chechnya, celebrating the birthday of the sun.
  * Pakistan celebrates the birthday of the Great Leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah
  * Residents of Chumbivilcas Province in Peru celebrate Takanakuy ("To Hit Each Other"), a fighting-themed holiday where the goal is to get back at people who wronged you during the year, while wearing a traditional ski mask.
  * Michael Palaiologos, ruler of Constantinople, has his 11-year-old second cousin blinded so that he is no longer qualified for the throne.
  * Columbus runs aground in Haiti due to incompetent management, then proceeds to abuse and enslave the natives that helped rescue his men and supplies.
  * Conquistador Pedro de Valdivia is defeated in battle, captured, then roasted and eaten.
  * A drunken mutiny involving 1/3rd of the candidates at West Point is finally put down by force and their whiskey is taken away.
  * Future president Zachary Taylor leads his troops into an obvious ambush by the Seminoles, leading to serious losses; gets promoted for it.
  * The Vietnamese National Party is founded and quickly begins a campaign of assassinations against French officers and Vietnamese collaborators.
  * Henri Nannen, later-rehabilitated Nazi propagandist, born.
  * A 7,6 earthquake kills 275 people in China
  * Scottish nationalist students steal the British coronation stone.
  * 44 untouchables in India massacred in revenge for them campaigning for higher wages.
  * Cyclone Tracy destroys more than 70% of the buildings in Darwin, Australia
  * Jesus Christ, aka messianist Marshall Fields, drives a Chevy Impala through the White House gate.
  * Charlie Chaplain dies
  * Porn actress Joanna Angel born
  * Deposed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauescu and his wife are captured, convicted by tribunal, and summarily shot.
  * The "underwear bomber" fails
  * Plane crash kills 27 people near Shymkent.

I'm actually curious about the balance here. When a tree dies and is left on its own, what percentage of its carbon ends up permanently in the soil vs. returning to the atmosphere after decomposition? I'm sure it varies greatly from forest to forest, of course - things like peat bogs having little decomposition, but probably much more efficient decomposition in rain forests. And how does this compare to, say, grassland? Or perhaps more to the point, how does it compare to the typical modern practice of sending your grass clippings to the municipal dump where they'll be entombed in a low-oxygen environment?

And back to trees, are there processes one can use to increase the amount of carbon stays in the soil? For example, does making biochar increase or decrease the sequestered carbon?

Gap in your thinking. The carbon is sequestered the instant it gets into the tree. Short-term, at least - as you note a good chunk will return to the atmosphere after the tree's death, the exact amount depending on a lot of details. But you don't have to wait 150 years for the benefits. A 150 year old redwood can be as tall as the Statue of Liberty. That's an awful lot of carbon held in there.

By picking the shape and trajectory, we can have quite good accuracy on where to land the debris. Pick a piece of federal desert land and there you go.

Seriously, the scenario as I understand it is: we'd park an asteroid in a high orbit

Bad assumption right from the beginning. That's a terrible waste of energy. You mine an earth-crossing asteroid. Chunks mined off an earth-crossing asteroid can be put onto an earth-intersecting trajectory with only the tiniest of delta-V (you might have to wait a long time your payloads, but no problem there). The amount of delta-V is so low (dozens to hundreds of m/s) that you wouldn't even need to use a rocket, you could just kick it off with a railgun or similar. Then you don't brake it when it gets to earth - it brakes itself by crossing through Earth's atmosphere ("aerocapture"). There are various optional things one could do with the reentry chunks to assist, such as small rockets for trajectory adjustment en-route or small high-speed chutes to keep the asteroids from completely obliterating themselves on reentry / landing (no need for a soft landing, it's fine for them to hit moving at hundreds of meters per second). Both of these would be dwarfed orders of magnitude over by the mass of the return chunk.

All you, as a mining operation, need to do is get your operation up to the asteroid. You need to be able to mine off chunks, shaped appropriately for optimal reentry, and kick them off onto an ideal reentry trajectory toward your target impact zone - potentially with the various hardware systems described as above, but in the base case, not with anything at all. You need a source of power (solar, nuclear) for mining and to kick your chunks into their Earth-intercept trajectory. And of course you have to deal with a million and one details, starting with how to mine at all in microgravity and what targets would actually have commercially viable quantities of valuable minerals.

Which is why you send as optimal of a size and shape as possible. Note that asteroids normally come in randomly and have random shapes. Humans can have a huge impact on the behavior by choosing an optimal shape and trajectory. And, as mentioned, drogue chutes could be used to further reduce the free fall velocity - not for a gentle impact, simply to keep the velocity down to a level that it won't completely obliterate itself in the atmosphere or on impact.

Yeah, but experience with gigantic hypersonic parachutes is also rather limited.

Again, it's really doubtful that there's any show stoppers here. But there's a lot that needs to be done before you can bet a whole mission on these sort of things. There's many thousands of little details that could kill the crew if they go wrong, so the odds of any one doing so must be kept to the tiniest fraction of a percent.

Except that your terminal velocity on Mars is orders of magnitude higher than on Earth. Decelerate to subsonic then fall and you'll be back supersonic in no time.

I'm sure this is possible to do, but it absolutely requires more research and testing.