These trends are not unique to America.

(Oh, and it was 1984, not 1983 when I first used my passport. So long ago.)

I remember the first time I used my passport - in 1983 - to discover (because the spook at Immigration didn't close the door behind him) that I'd already accrued several pages of notes accessible (to the right users) via my passport number.

Privacy was cherished.

Maybe by people. Not by "the Authorities". Never by "the Authorities".

And your owners/ managers, honouring no such binding oath, are the ones who dictate which services (profitable, of course) are supported and promoted, and which are denigrated and downgraded.

Now you know how Joe Random Prelate felt, setting the chestnuts out for Joe Random Pope's latest whore-party.

I believed tech could transform the world for the good

Transform the world, maybe. But as it turned out, it just became a tool for humans (sub-species businessmen) to make personal profit.

I'm just astonished that you could have such an optimistic opinion of humanity in ... was that the 1980s?

Definite DCMA violation there.
What do you mean, "I was using the analogue hole to listen to [sound] with the person in the same room as me."

Into the tumbrel ; off to the guillotine.

Didn't people foresee this? Back when a 4-digit UID actually meant something? In the late 1990s?

Case : yes (TechBroDudes implement a meaningless range of "countermeasures", which do not affect profitability.

Case : no (TechBroDudes do nothing that might affect case (1) ; otherwise as case : yes

And the surprise is ... ?

To store your governmental data.

I'm sure Googazon will be hauled over the coals by @NSA for not adhering to their contracts, and Amagle will respond "Your president did this, we can't physically force people to send us their data - even with your breakable encryption."

What could compel a sovereign power ( a word some Americans use, without understanding it) to store their data with a hostile power?

OK - here's an idea : you, as a government, instruct your "spooks" to send false data, suitably encrypted, for storage on $Enemy$ servers, knowing that $Enemy$ will decrypt them (thinking you you know nothing about this) and then they will think they have genuine "intelligence" "treasure", When, in fact, their treasure is shit.

Didn't anyone in the NSA/ CIA read any of John Le Carré's books?

Emperor's new leaky condom, and they're the ones getting fucked.

I don't normally waste my effort on reading sites like Phys.Org when I can find the original paper instead. Crap like this is why.

to scintillate, which is a fancy science word for "sparkle." We see the sparkle; we detect dark matter.

No. Bollocks. We see the scintillation, we run it through a spectrometer. Depending on the wavelength of the scintillation we may be seeing an intrinsic decay from some isotope of the detector material (noble gas, whatever ; sodium iodide is a popular industrial scintillator, with a moderate slew of potential contaminants). Or we may be seeing some background radiation from the surrounding rock. Or we may be seeing a cosmic ray from the small furry flatulent creatures of Alpha Centauri. It's a very long way from "see sparkle" to "collect Nobel".

In the unlikely event that one of the writers of Phys.Org actually reads this, this sort of slop is why you're considered 4th or 5th rate - if that high. If you've got a retarded English graduate in the editorial seat ... c'mon, you're physicists : practical demonstration of launch technologies involving his char and a high window? Clickbait article on adding mains-powered in-chair heating to a 7$ office chair? Do something practical. And make sure the blame attaches to a second English Graduate in "Management", to kill two stones with one bird.

Of course, it could have been written by AI. The standard is that low.

Your 3rd link is a duplicate of your second link.

I've never understood how people can lose their Slashdot IDs. Don't they, like understand how to keep offline backups of passwords? I mean, that's a pretty "had your geek card in" error.

I'd have to check dates, but I remember a friend (with an early broadband connection - at around 1000£/ month) telling me about it, so I signed up on dial-up. Learned to open multiple tabs, drop the connection (well, phone calls are metered by the second here) while composing replies, then re-connecting before posting them. Not as good as USENET, but worth the effort.

It is getting crappier and less interesting though. It's often a week or 10 days between my visits.

Unsurprisingly, not 3d-UIDs so far.

Yeah, but you're not everyone.

I don't know how organised natural history fans are in Iceland, but I know who I'd phone if I found a winged insect that I couldn't positively identify myself (which is most of them) and which I thought might be an invasive species (which I wouldn't really consider, since we already have several tens of species of mosquitoes, and many other genera of biting and non-biting flies). Most counties have a network of "recorders" responsible for collating reports of novel organisms, of organisms found in places where they hadn't been previously seen (how do you think the human-assisted spread of beavers has come to formal notice) and - for larger organisms, they also keep count of roadkill reports, which is a useful contribution to estimating wild populations.

There are plenty of good reasons for people with a natural history interest to keep track of novel (and "unrecognised", which may or may not be "novel") organisms, It may not be your cup of tea, but it's a perfectly normal part of natural history interests.

Yes, it is exactly the same itch of curiosity that leads to people writing new software that suits their needs better than existing software. Just differently directed.

Subject pretty much says it all.

Alternative spelling : Just think of it as Evolution in Action.

(With the caveat that people need to do the Reddit thing before dying without issue, to have maximal eugenic effect.)

They must have run into very strange and unexpected artefacts to have to rely on machine learning to correct this...

Or someone developed a new deconvolution algorithm some time between feature freeze on the instrument package (2012, thereabouts?) and today, and it turned out to be particularly more useful with the AMI focussing-aid.

But it's on-the-ground post-processing, so it can be retrospectively applied by any researcher on their "proprietary" period data, and by anyone else to non-proprietary data in the STSI archive.

Do you have any idea how competitive the process of getting observation time on JWST is? Something approaching 10% of time requests get granted. The other 90% don't get granted.

Your sketched procedure fails at

1. Take lots of photos of the same shot

And again at

2. Repeat step 1 for a lot of overlapping images

Curiosity (and Perseverance) are in a different situation - while the arm/ drill/ XRF tools are nose-up on a rock doing one set of analyses, the cameras can be more-or-less independently pursuing the sort of photographic oversampling you're talking about. The data from, say, an hour of XRF scanning is going to use a lot less bandwidth to Earth than an hour of imaging data.

Building design tends to go for a 2:1 safety margin between expected loads and design strengths. Bridges tend to be a lot more conservative 6:1 or 8:1 between design strength : expected load.

There are good arguments you can have whether a design (and construction process) should have an 8:1 safety margin, or a 6: 1 margin, into which you can easily get a 60% materials cost. If you can justify the lower safety factor and lower cost.

As the Forth road bridge example I just mentioned upthread illustrates, changes in vehicle design can seriously impact the expectations for a structure. The introduction through the 1980s of increased lorry weights from 28 tonnes when the bridge was designed and built to a maximum of 44 tonnes when a replacement bridge was commissioned lead to increased rates of wire breakages in the suspension cables and ... well you (and the bridge managers) can see where that's going to end up.

So, order of a hundred years?

Note : you asked about "bones", not fossils. The process of turning a bone (any tissue, really, but most often a bone or a tooth, for a vertebrate) into a fossil is a subject of it's own, stretching in effects from forensic science, through archæology and into regular palæontology Look up "taphonomy".

A 100 year lifetime isn't at all unreasonable for a structure. No structure is eternal (though the Pyramids are making a decent attempt - they'll probably not make it beyond their half-million).

I was driving over the new Forth road bridge recently, eyeballing the 140-odd year old riveted cast iron of the Rail Bridge, and the old road suspension bridge (which made it past it's 50 year design life but didn't make it's century because of increases in vehicle loads and counts leading to accelerating wear rates). I wonder how they're going to bring the old road bridge down? Dismantling, or dynamite? There are enough ships using that channel that dynamite has a *lot* of difficulties.