An additional weakness in these arguments is that they are using perfectly functioning devices.

What happens when you have some dumbass with a wildly broken thing get on a plane? Testing needs to occur under the worst possible conditions, not the best possible.

We already knew it was safe in the best possible conditions.

600 million people fly each year. A HUGE number. They need to find out if it is safe for every device in all possible combinations and all possible conditions, because the real world will present those combinations very quickly.

Don't start with the best case, start with the 1 in a million case. Proceed from there.

Oh, no, I agree, there is evidence that oversight isn't strict enough. There are also questions about sourcing the water used for fracking, and of course concerns for what to do with waste afterwards; it is a much newer technology and regulation has clearly lagged behind because of it.

But the fact remains, when you pump water and soap 3000 ft below the surface, into an area where there is a reservoir, and you are worried about what it getting out... you sound like a paranoid anti-science ignoramus.

Underground gasoline storage tanks are banned????

I'd better go tell my every gas station in the US, they're got a problem!

As far as your claim that you can't quantify the risks, why don't you try and do so? Here's a hint: It's doable. There are several ways you can do it, either from a geology direction (Hint: what are the characteristics of a hydrocarbon reservoir?) or from a public safety direction (Perhaps deaths and injuries/year? It's not like we don't have a massive amount of field testing from the past two decades.... Just to be fair, do a comparison to a comparison to the technology that cheap gas is reducing, which is coal).

Let me know what you find out.

I hear that gasoline is toxic, and we pump that into our cars, so we better ban cars, too.

Yawn

http://www.google.com/search?q=can+you+drink+fracking+fluid

Oh no, not chemicals! The vast, vast majority of what is pumped is water.

While I do understand how you feel, I would suggest that this is a success in many ways. %r%r Why did the humble bundle start out? Part of it was the goal of showing major game companies that there was a better way. Pay what you can, support charity, no DRM. %r%r While they obviously haven't gotten all the way there, the fact that a major studio's business model is to give away their games for free except what we want is a huge victory for the good guys. I don't like humble bundle going this way, but in the end it still is progress. This is something good happening in our world. A step in the right direction.

We... already have a treatment for HIV after you get it. The cocktails are now such that HIV has very little effect on life expectancy.

I would PM you if I could. don't even know if slashdot has that functionality. email me, krisrhodes at gmail.

The practical boundary is certainly microfossil measured, but those aren't as good a world-wide unique time stamp as the iridium anomaly - which in theory is uniform through the world and specific in time to a one year or so period. So yeah, no real disagreement here, but I'm also not about to start reading papers looking for the consensus K-T boundary either.

They only have one picture of the "fossil" in the paper, and to be honest - it doesn't look like one to me. Preservation looks absolutely terrible. They don't really talk about preservation. It doesn't look like there is more of the animal there (which does, of course, highly support transport). If you can't access the paper, let me know and I'll send it.

It is my understanding that the "official" K-Pg was defined based on the iridium spike, even though that was not what was used in this study.

But there isn't a -gap-. There is uncertainty as to the exact timing. A gap is a period when you are sure there isn't anything; uncertainty means you don't know. To the best of our knowledge - and constantly improving as more work is done - the uncertainty periods are getting smaller. This is evidence for concurrence. Concurrence is not disproven, and the evidence that supports it keeps getting better as it is refined.

There are no terrestrial beds of fossil bearing rock that also contain unequivocal markers of the K-T iridium spike. That's why we have correlation. There are lots of continuous beds of fossil bearing rock that do contain the K-T and show evidence of mass extinction - in the marine realm. Foram extinction and population is well documented and not disputed, as well as other marine creatures. The most likely explanation is that the impact had some role in the extinction.


|...as the one true theory....

The article doesn't claim anything about one true theory, and neither did I. Straw man at it's best. Scientists look for evidence and weigh it. I recommend you learn more about Bayes theorem and then reexamine the evidence.

Gradual extinction is still a possibility, but that's been covered by other studies and there is little to no evidence that specifically supports it.

What this paper does way in on is the claims that the extinction happened a long time (3m of rock worth of time) before the impact. If this is an unreworked bone, those claims are dead.