Just hope that I don't have to listen to their commander's poetry. I am in the cargo hold hoping that they don't find me. I thought that the plan was to send LNG ships to Neptune this winter to make up for the gas shortages in Europe but I guess Germany will just have to tough it out this year. The Vogons might have their work done for them if the thorium g bomb goes off. Then they would not have to justify killing off earths population to create a bypass we will have done it for them.

A methane gas giant must have had a source of creating methane that we do not currently understand. Compressed organics are our source as are cows and politicians, on Neptune there must be huge numbers of celestial politicians and cows, otherwise the gas giant could not exist.

Methane does not smell. Usually it is the sulphurous smell created by the expulsion of SO2 by bacteria in combinations with methane. Part of the issue with gas wells is that by far the majority are not "sweet gas" but contain noxious sulphurous gases including one that the Nazi's considered for exterminating undesirables. H2S which in concentrations greater than 10 parts per million becomes debilitating and in concentrations greater than 40 parts per million can become lethal. At 100 parts per million it is uniformly lethal to humans. If you are still breathing by then.

Moral of this tale is just cause it stinks it don't mean much. All hail to the Cyanobacteria that created us, they love the H2S down in the black smokers. There they sit waiting for us to fart and gas ourselves into extinction so they can spawn new life again. Depressing as hell that we are not in control of the destiny of the planet that nurtured us into existence in the first place. All we can do is fsck it up temporarily with our ecological stupidity and leave a mess for our children to clean up if they can. We are a greedy stupid peoples and our greed and ecological stupidity will be our down fall as a species. The best that we can hope for is that our extinction event is not a complete one and that if we do evolve past our greed powered state that the off spring of our making becomes more responsible caring for the ecology that sustains them and the rest of life on this planet.
It is a small world after all indeed'.

Or one hell of a neat way to finally get rid of naked bungie jumping for good without even creating a new law. Instead the laws of physics would see the end to the practice.

Good point, other long term infections that are vary in degrees of severity all the way up to being considered chronic act in similar ways. The HCV virus is one of them. Long term infection by HCV and many other viral infections can manifest symptoms in many different ways. Asymptomatic graves disease has been documented to be a manifestation of a small percentage of HCV suffers, non specific skin allergies and other autoimmune disorders have also been documented as being higher among long term sufferers of HCV. Antibodies to HCV do not work and it seems that the virus has a mechanism to sabotage the human immune system in ways that disguises the virus in the body.

Covid because it infects so rapidly in most people either progresses faster than the immune system can cope or in some cases seems to act in a similar way to infections like HVC which relies upon hepatocytes for reproduction and blood for transmission. COvid seems to create antibodies and their precursors in some people that are more damaging than the initial infection is long term. Here is hoping that the next sets of mutations is similar to the common cold virus which has the same mode of transmission as Covid viruses.

[satire]

A zombie recombinant version of a virus like Covid seems unlikely unless rna has learned how to copulate with other viruses like HCV...which I doubt.

But if one is to believe some of the bullshit on facebook and other low brow sites on the web in general; then the dreaded illuminati and their gray alien friends are at work behind the scenes trying to create endless waves of recombinant Covid in secret labs hidden deep in the tunnels created by Musk for them or in their counterpart hidden away in cave in Tibet and Mongolia. They are all evil beings that have been on earth since Adam and Eve just waiting until they can kill god and finally emerge and take over the planet.[/satire]

The rapid spread of variants of Covid is a natural result of human overpopulation and a mother of a virus rna code that takes advantage of the rapid evolution made possible by the infections of so many host living organisms at the same time. We can only hope that it evolves to less deadly forms which would make sense as a survival strategy of evolution. A variant that becomes more deadly is doomed to extinction whereas the less deadly but extremely highly infectious variants survive. Just hope this theory scours and plows the fields!

Forget using Google software and switch to Edge! Where I am currently working Chrome still works on Win 10 only because the interface is set to use Win 7 mode for all the client nodes of the network. Win 10 "pro" stations however have the same problems as Win 10 full desktop with Chrome crashing even if you run the latest versions. It seems that Edge has hacked the hell out of the Blink Google engine that they use now on Edge. Funny as hell how the war with Google is still alive and kicking.

It is getting almost as crashy running Netscape as an internet communication/browser on Windows NT was back in the early days of Microsoft trying to take over all important business com on the net. This is being posted over Chrome on Win 10 pro hopefully before it crashes during a hidden background Windows com procedure. Maybe I should do some call tracing to find out which runtime is crashing the trail might be fairly simple to sus out considering it was written Microsurf no doubt.

There is some monkey business going on in an obfuscated window\system\* file call that makes Blink blink with the Chrome code on Windows 10 without a doubt.

The functionally identical Blink engine interface seems to never crash or hang never on just about any other OS built on the Linux kernel though. So go figure, Chrome was rock solid and stable on Win 2000, XP and 7 now it is starting to act exactly in the same manner Netscape did on earlier versions of the Windows so call operating system. it seems that Scroogle is alive and well in the land of Gates. despite claims to the being a dead stratagem coming from the key mouths of Microsoft. Just my observation but there seems to be "something rotten at Microsoft in the state of Washington" again.

Barely a dint in there reserves, the Swiss ignored what happened to money when the gold standard was dropped by the US and set aside assets and allowed continued trading in solid assets. The result is that gold has gone stupid and if you held several billions of gold after the second world war then you can easily absorb risk today. Same thing when the old Soviet Union decided to mine the crap out of just about every hill where they could find gold and dump it on the market. Gold tanked for a while until Gorby came to power and the Soviet empire became completely insolvent.

To make up for the loss the bank will simply sell off a bunch of gold to the Chinese and now Russian billionaires who still hoard it and the Swiss economy will barely feel a hiccup, maybe a little bit of a case of indigestion for a while as the price of gold drops somewhat because of a sudden international glut of billions of dollars worth of bullion being sold on the international market. But the IMF will keep it's mouth clammed shut and turn a blind eye to the transactions as will the US fed in the interests of keeping the ultra rich "international investors" of the world happy. Hell there might even be leases of real estate in Sochi exchanged for the purposes of building towers and golf courses.

The ultra rich are all speculators and take advantage of places where skirting regulations is easily bought. As witness the fact that here are always new tax havens suddenly popping up where the ultra rich ass holes of the world squirrel away assets like gold. Switzerland was once the mecca, now it is all over the planet where politicians and dictators can be easily bought and sold.

The fact that it didn't turn around and hover over the White House means that just maybe the aliens in their ship of frozen nitrogen got Trumps message.

We are a lonely species out on the far reaches of a spiral arm of this galaxy. All we can do is look up to the sky in hopes that there is someone else out there in the cosmos willing to comfort us in our loneliness.

If we survive our propensity for alienating each other then just maybe some other from of life out in the cosmos will come to comfort us.

The fact that a group of otherwise sane individuals would put on running shoes and drink the coolaid and then wait for the mother ship in their "resting beds" simply means that otherwise sane humans can be lead to insanity by domineering alpha jerks in a great many ways. 2016 proved that.

We certainly have not proven that there is no other advanced life out there because this piece of ice behaved in a very strange way as if it was under some form of propulsion control vectoring. If it was off gassing nitrogen in large quantities because it was too close to our sun then the math necessary to surmise the trajectory variances that it took is already a theoretically know factor.

So we have nothing to worry about with aliens invading our planet or country. Besides, having a commander in Chief with bone spurs almost certainly would assure an alien victory should the chunk of ice turn around and decide to hover over the White House in 2024 or '25. The new space force doesn't have enough time to build a space wall adequate to keep them out!

In 2024 this is what a Trump rally will look like Sad indeed that it the republicans of today have become a party of choice for those who would turn back the clock and bring back an America which slips back into segregation as the klan influenced politicians did for so many years. Then again you never know with Donald Trump, hell he might even chose someone like Condy Rice as a running mate in 2024 or heaven forbid, Colin Powel if he is really keen to stir the pot then why not run with someone that will really piss his supporters off.

Indeed Trump "drained the swamp" that was the GOP, leaving spineless morons like moscow Mitch and a bunch of pond scum. It is only a matter of time before the alt right shows itself again now that Trump has emboldened them enough that they are taking their pointed hats out of the closet. Unless the GOP gets a spine and dumps the jerk for good there will be racial trouble that can become intractable because of the way that the GOP has moved and become the party of the all American bigot.

Fake news and misinformation is marketing. How the hell else could a moron have been elected president of the US, unless a significant portion believe lies and downright bullshit coming out of the Trump camp and the news organisations that helped him to power. Here is a little bit of fake news for you; Fox news has the greatest number of fact checkers of any news organisation in the world. The voracity of their reporting is beyond reproach and to the highest journalistic standards.

Putin and his supporters are just another bunch opportunistic businessmen and have learned their craft from the best teachers of the craft of lies for political gain. The American mafia of old who they have simply replaced internationally. The vaccine is a tool for them and they certainly are not using it for diplomatic purposes just because it saves lives. If they do not promote the production in the countries where they are selling it then the exercise is one of a power ploy not a humanitarian undertaking. In this regard the west is no better some times.

Unless the WHO is helped by all countries in getting the vaccine out and it is done in the light of day without politics getting in the way this pandemic will last longer than it should. Fledgling institutions of international cooperation need to be supported now more than ever otherwise we will all fall prey to the problems that tribalism creates for humanity and squander great opportunities to stop the madness of social prejudice and mistrust that brings out the worst in us as humans. This madness is the reason why we turn to dictatorships like the ones currently ruling Russia and elsewhere: instead of genuinely cooperating with others that are of different tribal origins.

There, fixed that for you.

Just watch out for Danny. He ran over our lambda a very long time ago because of a drop table attached to his stupid VB scripts and network data base hooks. Mary who owned the Lambda was in tears when she tried to order more wool.

Seriously though, we still have the difficulties with old VB code from back before Windows was capable of being a secure multiuser environment whether on the intranet or the internet. Things have gotten better over time but the chaos created by having to run interfaces built by individuals that do not have a clue about how to garner out access privilege so that a simple function does not hose a working server is still a curse upon office com.

Having coders do things that do not have a clue about how to secure an SQL link to a spread sheet is an ongoing nightmare. Fixing so called "programs" created directly in excel by individuals who skip the essentials of simple flow chart designs because they were never schooled in them in the first place, is like having the Muppets or Shawn the Sheep and his buddy Lambda do your work for you. You might not get exactly what you bargained for or be prepared for a hours of tracking down and fixing shit. Sometimes it is cheaper to just use paper and a temporary ledger than it is to try to fix the mess that VB code can create in Excel hooked into a networked data base.

Edmund is just fine fyi, he lives right next to me across from the Walmart at the base of Olympus Mons. Unfortunately Elon has bought out all the other prime real estate in our neighborhood. Prices have really gone up just lately especially with the Covid problems happening on the other planet. We got over the Chicken Pox epidemic and have plenty of free space now elsewhere here on Mars, especially around the polar regions.

0 to 60 and beyond reason. Unless you want to compete with UPS delivery of lion batteries like this fellow did. Or like to drive like you are on the Lauberhorn. Like this guy does.

The way some people are driving them who needs to watch Gone in 60 Seconds to get some entertainment. Duck here comes another Tesla and you never know when it will do a General Lee special. Far too many otherwise sane people are getting hyped up nuts with the automobiles of today. Unfortunately it is impossible to effectively legislate against stupidity or even downright insanity on the roads of today. With the Model F in the works it won't be long until the insanity of the rat race of morons behind the wheel will take to the air. But hopefully not in my life time I will let my grand children deal with that inevitable level of human carnage caused by the stupidity of consumer driven madness we all love so much.

Still, Apple phones have nothing on my Windows phone. I am thoroughly entranced with Azure and have my head firmly planted in the clouds. The problem is it is getting a little lonely up here in silicon heaven.