I don't care about the one used by the USPTO ; I care about the system that we have to deal with. Which has been in legislative existence for about a century longer than the "US" part of the "USPTO."

Actually, the next time I see zymurgist Les (a fellow soldier-scientist from the anti-Creationist trenches), I'll have to check details with him, if he knows. He's a patent adviser now, rather than a scientist, so he may be involved in wording things so that they'll get past the Patent Office here AND past the USPTO, but obviously mean vastly different things in the two countries. It is, after all, "law", not sense.
But TBH, we're more likely to talk about beer.

HTTPS means that you have a securely encrypted connection with the remote server.

Are you sure about that? I thought that having an HTTPS connection means that the client and server have agreed on an encryption protocol to use, but that the list of acceptable encryption protocols in a lot of configurations includes "plain text". Certainly it used to include that possibility, as a common fall-back position. Possibly implementations have improved since, but it would be a surprise if so.

https is designed to prevent others from intercepting the traffic en route - it has basically nothing to do with how the data are stored. Should everything be encrypted? Yeah. Passwords should be salted+hashed+more because

... "because they should" ; yes.

Unfortunately, one of the methods of "encryption" that is permitted under the standards for HTTPS (and, I think, SSL) is "plain text".

As long as both ends of the conversation agree that this is the "encryption method" that they are going to use for the transaction, then the SSL/ HTTPS transaction completes validly. It's stupid, but it's valid.

What one really needs is for clients (i.e. our browsers and email clients) to refuse to drop down as far as "plain text". Which will break some service providers, and that will be a good thing. Either they fix their security, or they go out of business ; BFD.

XKCD kinda shows this problem. We still don't have a good way to transfer files with people on different network. We have the technology but no clear standard.

I see your XKCD and raise you a different XKCD. Which is sad, but true.

a rival copied and surpassed the Howell's capability.

Apparently patents haven't been invented yet.

It was the capability that is reported as copied and then surpassed, not necessarily the method of achieving that capability.

Say that you have a patent on killing mice using a machine-vision system, servos and an air pistol. Great fine and marvellous ; it kills mice.
I come along and think ... "kill mice", and design a method using squeak detectors per-room and a knee-high-to-a-mouse rotating laser system that chops them off at the patella (and elbow).

Have I violated your patent? The normal phrasing of a patent is "A method to achieve X."

Many prisons use electronic locks on all the doors,

They might in your country (I'm going to guess that it's somewhere between Canada and Mexico), but you've got a massively industrialised incarceration business, with an incentive to maximise profits for the corporations who run the prisons. Most European prisons (there are a few exceptions in Britain, which are struggling to break even) are state-run and incarcerate typically less than a tenth of the proportion of the population that the American penal system does. Being much smaller (a thousand person prison is "huge"), economies of scale are also smaller.

Not having been in jail myself, but the inside of police stations that I have seen, all the locks are mechanical. No wiring to compromise ; no servers vulnerable to being hacked. To open, or close, a door needs someone with the correct key to go to the correct door, insert and turn that key. Sometimes, a key needs to be turned simultaneously on either side of the door, which makes stealing a warders keys considerably less effective.

When was the last time that we had a successful break out from a prison higher than minimum ("parole", literally) security prison. I can't remember one. I can remember occasional riots, and a couple of warders getting killed several decades ago ; but no associated break-out. Which tends to suggest that the level of security is appropriate to the actual threat.

Why should I descend into grouchiness? Indeed, why should one ascend from grouchiness? I've not seen anything in the Slashdot ToS requiring unfailing good humour, and I see plenty of good reason for bad humour.

I honestly doubt the ability of the human race to accept the reality of such a severe threat. I don't think that they're going to do it. So ... there will be a hecatomb (not a "decimation" - look up the original meaning of the word, not modern softened usages ; I'm not sure that English has a word for the 2/3 to 4/5 losses that I anticipate), followed by a population bottleneck.

Whether a new hominid species (with an improved ability to face facts) arises ... well, we're not going to see that ourselves. Unless there's some spectacular medical technology in the pipeline, and you can bring yourself to use such.

Change.

Go back and study the data that is reported in the studies under discussion and the state of understanding of the Chandler Wobble in the late 1970s. It's NOT an extended span of data, it's a change in behaviour.

But hey, why should I do your homework for you. It was my homework in the 1970s, so it can be your homework for the 2010s.

You're envisaging that an impact on the Moon causes enough mass of ejecta that the amount impinging on the Earth's atmosphere is enough to do ... something significant? Or that a single impactor of sufficient size is ejected from the lunar impact which could then impact on a city/ county/ state/ country/ continent and obliterate it?

The latter case is pretty implausible : you'd want an ejectum of several kilometres diameter to be a worthwhile opponent. The 50-odd metres of the Barringer impactor really isn't enough to wipe out much more than a small city. Particularly the sprawling cities of America. To get an ejectum from an impactor, you need a very large shear rate, which only occurs in a small range of angles from the axis of the impactor. (Unless you've got a very grazing impact.) So you're unlikely to have a big enough volume to generate such a large impactor. And you'd get a much larger volume of smaller ejecta generated at the same time.

Producing lots of "Chelyabinsk" or "Tunguska" like air-bursters ... that's a more credible situation. But it'd still need a fairly large impactor, and they are the less common ones. And I think that they're more likely to impact the Earth than the Moon (and then spray the Earth with secondary ejecta).

But to be honest, I'd lose more sleep over the big impactor headed directly for Earth than the effects of secondary ejecta from a Lunar impact. And I do pay attention to these things, looking at the (literally) astronomical chances of them happening and affecting me, and I don't lose sleep over that (being far enough inland and up-hill to not worry about a distant ocean strike).

Water melons vary by a factor of ... 3 or 4 (I don't know - I don't think that the season has started yet, has it ? ; certainly haven't brought one for ... a couple of years. Pomellos, on the other hand ; lots.), and beachballs, again, I don't think I've seen one for I don't know how long. The gale force winds tend to make them a bit academic on the local beach. So sorry, your parochial size terminology is useless to me.

"Boulder" says precisely what it means to say, no more and no less.

In this context, I read "boulder" as being a technical term, from the list of sediment grain size classes. The largest class of sediment grains is "boulder", at sizes greater than 256mm (yes, it's a power-of-two scale) ; so a "small boulder" is something not far above this boundary condition.

"small boulder" is completely the correct term to use. Just because it sounds like the talk you'd hear on the street, doesn't mean that it's not a precisely worded technical description.

(Yes, I am a geologist, and yes, I do use this size scale every working day of my life.)

You may be right but many of the effects of global warming are really starting to manifest themselves.

The effects are becoming clearer. But I've been watching these things happening for my whole adult life - 30 odd years of it now. The dominant historical comment on the late 20th century is sure to be "missed opportunities".

Over the next 5 or 10 years they will be increasingly difficult to ignore.

They've been impossible to ignore for decades. But people still somehow ignored them.

I guess it's the optimist in me thinks more and more people will have their "Come to Jesus" moment over this and the tide will turn.

Sorry, but I fail to see how getting sexually excited over a non-existent delusional Jewish carpenter's son is going to help. Do you have a lot of irrational religious whack jobs in your nation, and are they allowed out of their asylums and into power?

I'm glad there's room for the rest of us in your brave new world of highly specialized humans

I'm glad for you. Please feel free to consider your abundance of mechanizable skills to be your problem, for you to find a solution to.

Yes, I'm specialized ; but mainly because I work in a situation where teams are assembled on a timescale of a few months, for a task that lasts for a few months, then the teams are separated and go onto the next job, to reassemble in a different configuration ; with no standardisation of components (well, more like the classic and highly cutting XKCD 927), someone has to act as glue between the components, and that's me.

"True North and True South" are defined by the geographical grid system (or whichever local grid your country uses). Certain locations (typically astronomical observatories) have accepted physical locations (the Transit Circle at Greenwich, for example). These locations define a grid.

The Earth has a rotation axis, which passes through the Earth's surface at two points ; these points are not (directly) connected to the geographical grid described above. (Originally the two were expected to be the same, but for over a century it has been known that they're not.) As the rotation axis moves around compared to the geographical grid, these are plotted against time.

Thirdly, there is a magnetic field with it's own poles where it's symmetry axis passes through the surface of the Earth ; this moves around a lot more, and more rapidly, in response to poorly-understood changes in the deep Earth, and is also pushed around by magnetic fields from the sun.

All three poles move relative to each other. Nothing is fixed or stable in the long term.