liability

Probably neither. The evidence for any of this is about as strong as the evidence for Bigfoot. A bunch of tall tails from people who swear they're sincere.

They can build nests. Nest building seems to often get overlooked in discussions about tool use, perhaps because shelter isn't traditionally considered a sort of tool? But it seems tool-like to me. Maybe nest building doesn't impress us because bugs do it too?

Besides lacking thumbs, dolphins would also have a pretty hard time harnessing fire as a tool. This probably truncates their tech tree severely.

If the original were still intact, perhaps chemical analysis of the pigments used could provide information about this. Unfortunately it seems that can't be done since the mural was destroyed decades ago. But maybe fragments of it remain in the area waiting to be found?

The article mentions arsenical bronze being unlike bronze made in the rest of the world, but that's not true. Arsenical bronze has been made around the world for thousands of years. This is likely due to arsenic often being found in close proximity to copper while sources of tin are harder to find. However it's my understanding that some cultures in the Andes did have access to tin and produced tin bronze as well as arsenical bronze.

And hydrogen or synth fuel aren't expensive? If these alternatives weren't more expensive then the problem would be moot because the industry would be voluntarily using them already.

The desperation I've seen in addicted gamblers in Las Vegas doesn't seem so different from the despair I've seen from junkies. Both of these are addictions to which some people lose everything.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jul/19/problem-gamb...

Unless you think he's lying, who fucking cares what his motivation for whistleblowing is? Many whistleblowers want to get back at companies that screwed them, or want to get interviewed on cable news, or want a book deal, or whatever. Who fucking cares if they're not ideologically pure altruistic saints? What matters is the truth, not the motivations of those telling the truth.

(Do people with exclusively pure selfless motivations even exist? Even people who donate to charities anonymously are plausibly motivated at least in part by the warm tingly feeling they enjoy when giving charitably.)

You've forgotten that we have a limited capacity for solar cell production and those solar cells are put to better use replacing coal plants than synthesizing something plants can synthesize.

Hydrogen embrittlement leads to hydrogen leaks. Unless there are advanced alloys that resist it, any aircraft part that comes into contact with the hydrogen will be subject to accelerated 'wear'.

Frankly hydrogen planes are nonsense. Even if it works on paper, it's not realistic to expect all the extant planes to be rapidly phased out with brand new planes with exotic designs that aircraft manufacturers, pilots, and airlines don't have any experience with. On the other hand, old planes can be retrofitted to burn biofuel and new production planes of old proven designs can be made to burn biofuel from the get-go.

'Concept planes' like the ZEROe are basically just science fiction meant to wow shareholders and give the public the impression that legislative reform isn't necessary because corporations are already taking the problem seriously. I don't think these are serious proposals, it's just corporate propaganda. Car companies pushed hydrogen cars for years for the same reason. Hydrogen fuel cell cars were never going to happen for a myriad of practical reasons and car manufacturers knew it but promoted the concept anyway for PR reasons. ZEROe is Airbus doing the same.

But this is my point; biofuel makes a ton of sense for aviation. Biofuels would be used in cases where there is no realistic alternative, particularly with airplanes. It's more practical and likely to succeed in this domain than hydrogen, and isn't a total pipe dream like battery powered planes. In other domains, like grid power or automobiles, solar/wind/etc are the way to go (I never suggested we run power plants off biofuel!), but there is still a fuckton of coal and natural gas plants that need to be replaced. Trying to also replace jet fuel with synth fuel at the same time will only set back efforts to close coal and natural gas plants. If we already had a surplus of clean electrical energy then things would be different, but we don't. Every solar farm dedicated to the production of synth fuel is a solar farm that isn't replacing a coal plant.

I just don't see any way that synthesis of jet fuel from atmospheric carbon makes any sense for anybody but a nuclear Navy.

I believe popular proposals involve the use of algae. Regardless, farming in general is something modern civilization already has a strong competency in. Synthesizing jet fuel from scratch might make sense for the USN since they have nuclear reactors and all the water they want, but I think it's fair to say our civilization in the general case struggles with generating huge amounts of clean electricity. Plants do it with solar energy on a scale we should be jealous of. And so what of they take a few months to do it? They take that long to grow the food you eat too and it's not like you starve for months waiting for them.

> for a very specific number of hours

Unless you plan on throwing away the planes after one or two flights, those tanks will be filled with hydrogen for tens of thousands of hours over their lifespan. Perhaps they have light weight alloys that can cope with this though, I'm no metallurgist..

> start from CO2

Why would that route even be taken though? Biofuel for jet engines is proven technology in limited use for many years now. Let plants deal with the CO2, since they're good at it, then process the resultant vegetable oils to produce a suitable diesel or jet fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel

Only if you forget to factor potential support problems into your economic analysis. What would your systems being down for a week because Google capriciously shut you down cost you?

> they are using data and research to improve their UI

That's what every UI/UX ''expert'' says and 99% of them are full of shit.

There is no "usual flu vaccine", they make a new one twice a year, meant to address whatever strain is in circulation.

If they covered up this, what else would they cover up? The coverup itself is cause for concern because it proves they're dishonest.

> What if genetics goes awry (Jurassic Park)?

That was the movie, not the book. The book was "What if profit-motivated biotech startups go awry." In the book Hammond is an unsympathetic greedy asshole who causes a disaster by cutting corners and evading regulators/oversight, all to get filthy rich. His reward is being devoured alive by petty scavenger dinosaurs at the very end of the book when everybody is is being rescued. The book is more a critique of capitalism than it is science. A critique of the commercialization of science.

Predictably, these themes were diminished for the Hollywood adaptation. Hammond becomes a naive manchild who loves dinosaurs and is more a victim than a villain.

I think news/media has some of the blame too. Science reporting in general is atrocious, journalists and editors are constantly misrepresenting and exaggerating the actual claims of scientists. I wish I had a nickel for every "Scientists invent new battery 10000x better than lithium" headline I've read. Eventually people become generally skeptical of these claims and skeptical of the scientists themselves even though the scientists never made the sensational claims misleadingly attributed to them by the media.

It's a horrible fusion of the 'telephone game' and the boy who cried wolf.

'Meme' came about when Dawkins modified the word 'mimeme' to sound like 'gene'. AFAIK that was first done in that book.

> Reading a book takes more effort than it used to.

I agree with most of your points but not this one. The proliferation of audio books and text-to-speech (TTS) has made reading books easier than ever. Particularly TTS in my case; I can read an eBook visually for a few hours, then switch to TTS for a while to give my eyes a break, and in this way easily marathon books. Once you are accustomed to TTS you can turn the speed up very fast. I tune the speed on the fly to compensate for mental fatigue to maintain a consistent level of comprehension; when I'm 'in the groove' I can comfortably set TTS to around 750wpm. I can read visually faster than that, but only in a 'sprint', not with endurance. (I find that for finishing a book quick, it's better to be a tortoise than a hare.)

I read nonfiction and fiction like this. Math heavy texts aren't well suited for it, nor books with many charts and tables, but except for a few cases like that it's very adaptable. Modern TTS even handles weird names in fantasy novels surprisingly well.

Please leave the sardonic shitposting on reddit. This discussion deserves better.

> "2. Mormons have a very tight social network. We REALLY trust one another. Its actually one of the great things about the religion. However, this makes us very vulnerable to fraud. There are lots of scummy MLMs in Utah that exploit the already established social circles in Utah."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud

FYI the 'id' in 'id Software' is lowercase. It's a word (not an initialism or acronym) so 'Id' would be more grammatically correct, though the name of the company is nevertheless lowercase.

Microsoft now owns id. They bought all of Zenimax, not just Bethesda.

Yeah but that single game has sold as much as ten 'The Last of Us'es. Microsoft sells their best games on Sony's platform too.

Isn't Minecraft a bigger game than anything Sony makes? It's owned by Microsoft but isn't an xbox exclusive.

A lot of people dislike Bethesda's management, is there now any risk of ex-Bethesda managers or executives poisoning the other game studios Microsoft owns?

The issue remains that your ircd is still wide open, waiting for somebody more creative to find another way of opening connections inside your LAN on arbitrary ports. Counting on browsers to keep your network secure is foolish.