I would expect that you'd need something like a large pottery vase or jar with a tapered hole in the bottom. You cut the length of sapwood, wrap one end with a fiber cord until you can push it down into the hole and have it fit tightly with the branch sticking out the bottom (a rubber gasket would be better, but may not be readily available), then pour your 'raw' water into the vase and hang it over another container to catch the water that passes through the branch. A higher-tech solution would use some sort of pump to raise the pressure on the source side to push water through the branch faster, but that would require a greater investment of material; pottery and fiber cord should be products available in even subtechnological cultures.

Marking their shell with the date of their harvest doesn't do you any good if you don't know how long it will be until the next time they moult; anything marking or attached to their shell will stay with the shell at moult, so if you harvest a crab, bleed it, mark the shell, and it moults a month later, you might pick up the same crab before it has a chance to recover.

The 'no parachutes' directive was a simple piece of high-level idiocy; it was felt that aviators would not press home their attacks with sufficient determination if they were given an avenue of escape from their plane, so that they might choose to bail out of only lightly-damaged aircraft. Early in the war, aircraft were at a premium, and the cachet of air service was such that they had all the volunteers they could ask for -- and early parachutes were bulky and heavy, hard to fit in the cramped cockpits of early aircraft (space for a chute pack not being designed into the pilot's seat the way WWII aircraft were). For most of the war, neither side's pilots had parachutes; they only began to be issued to German pilots in 1918 -- so the short-sightedness can be laid at the feet of both sides in the war, although the Germans eventually did decide that giving a pilot a chance to save their own life was better, particularly as they had begun to suffer from a lack of experienced pilots.

That depends on what your warhead/payload is. With a hypersonic missile to disperse it, how much territory could you effectively cover while dispersing, say, a hundred kilos of weaponized anthrax spores?

From what I've seen, the vast majority of ads can be described as either "You are hideously careless with your health, nutrition, or hygeine if you do not use our product" or "You will become instantly more attractive to the opposite sex if you purchase/use our product", with the occasional "If you have enough money, you can avoid feeling as if you're just another sardine crammed into this aluminum cigar tube when you fly" ad, and the self-referential "Our retelling of this basic plot is better than the other 10,000 retellings of the same basic plot, because our retelling has better/more exposed skin/special effects/explosions/action/makeouts/big-name actors, whether or not any of that is relevant to the plot." ads to get you to watch movies or TV programs that themselves are vehicles to keep you in your seat to be exposed to more ads.

After five hundred years, the likelihood that any of the terrorist plots outlined in the Voynich Manuscript have either been carried out or abandoned approaches unity; there's nothing in it that would be useful for extending control over the current population.

Well, of course it's easy -- look at what they're teaching in the Business Administration department in colleges: that it doesn't matter what a company does, or what it produces, or what any of the individual employees do in their jobs; someone trained in modern business management can walk in off the street and competently manage the people under them at any level from the work group all the way up to CEO.

More properly, using calculators that lie about being "algebraic" and use a bastard mix of algebraic and RPN are confusing to use. Why do I say this? Think about it. with an RPN calculator, dyadic functions are (number) (number) (function), while monadic functions are (number) (function). With so-called "algebraic" calculators, while dyadic functions are (number) (function) (number) (equals), monadic functions are (number) (function) -- which is RPN.

Yet another reason not to opt-in to data collection...

First he's got to get past Disney lugging another shipping container full of money to Congress to further extend the Mickey Mouse Perpetual Protection Act... err... copyright duration.

"Ye knowe ek that in forme of speeche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do;
Ek for to wynnen love in sondry ages,
In sondry londes, sondry ben usages."
-- Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Cressida

("You know also that in (the) form of speech (there) is change
Within a thousand years, and words then
That had value, now wonderfully curious and strange
(To) us they seem, and yet they spoke them so,
And succeeded as well in love as men now do;
Also to win love in sundry ages,
In sundry lands, (there) are many usages."
-- Translation by Roger Lass in "Phonology and Morphology." A History of the English Language, edited by Richard M. Hogg and David Denison. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008)

Leaving aside issues of axle weight and the wear on the road infrastructure, every time I take my car in for its smog check, the mileage is recorded along with the VIN and engine number. That happens every other year, and averaging that distance across the interval since the last smog check would give an average miles per day, which produces an annual miles-driven value for a per-mile tax without any ability to track the location of the vehicle. And for the inevitable 'but this doesn't account for the car being driven out of state' objections, neither does the proposed mileage meters; you can't tell where the car is being driven without being able to track where the car is. And this data is already being collected; there is no additional recordkeeping involved.

Oh, yes; the Democrats should agree to doing it this way so that they can lose the fight over the Affordable Care Act without a chance to preserve it. If they let the House pass bills that fund the government on a program-by-program basis, then the House Republicans will slowly work their way through bills that fund every government program except the Affordable Care Act. And by the time this happens, the Democrats will have already conceded on every other funding issue, so they'll have nothing to use to bargain with the Republicans to preserve the President's signature program, and the Democrats will have allowed the Republicans to kill the Affordable Care Act by inches. And the last few funding bills will be over clearly niggling-cost but high-visibility programs, so that if the Democrats try to get up on their high horse and demand funding for the Affordable Care Act, the Republicans can point at them and laugh at how they're willing to hold up these minor programs in order to get this much bigger program funded, making them look ridiculous. The Democrats can't concede on an a la carte funding process.

Ahh, so that's what they're called. I had a bag of these (wood) when I was a kid, and just called them my 'math blocks'.

“This is the future we must avert. This is the global threat of our time. And for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late. That is our job. That is our task. We have to get to work.”

Hardly sounds as if Obama considers "climate change" to be a sideline. You just have to look at Obama's Climate Action Plan to see for yourself. In his speech on climate change in June, he declared that he would be invoking his executive authority to invoke a number of measures aimed at curbing climate change and 'preparing' America for its costly impacts. In that speech, with the quip "We don't have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society", he summarily dismissed any possibility of considering that the holy doctrine of anthropogenic climate change might be wrong, despite the repeated failure of climate models to reproduce the global cooling of the last fifteen years.

--
"You are charged with preaching wrongful, pernicious, and misleading doctrine about anthropogenic global warming."