cat whisker detector

This one just requires a lump of germanium and a pin or small wire.

Traditionally, one would have used galena (natural lead II sulfide) crystals. I also recall most "boys'" radios - the type you'd find in Cubs/Scouts/etc. handbooks - using a razor blade as the contact whisker, probably because it was the simplest way to get a small contact point and stiffness at the same time with materials a kid would likely have to hand.

Yes. If you examine PNG format, it actually uses pixels around a pixel to predict its value and compress the difference, which is much closer to 0 values. It actually uses zlib to compress just like gzip.

FirefoxOS

You have a good point about tech getting bigger. What worries me is that tech starting to profit more from war. Surveillance , GIS, AI, chips, robotics... are already a huge area and expanding. It is not a stretch to imagine a scenario like facebook signing a deal to provide intelligence, google or amazon providing infrastructure.

low effort intelligence collection. I wouldn't mind "investing" into those companies if I were an agency employing who are basically incompetent crooks.

if you manage to convince almost entire population to use an app that you can easily tap to I wouldn't call that "incompetent"

my own experience is that I have to eat a sickening amount of meat to get enough minerals so I started to get some supplements. apparently vegs that I can buy are little more than starch and sugar.

one who reports harassment today will report illegal conduct tomorrow. not good for doing business nowadays. you must be domesticated to be any use to coroporations.

It is fun to watch cars changing lanes like maniacs as if it matters.

Lane change behavior looks completely unrealistic to me. I see cars switching lanes on deceleration into a traffic jam, which doesn't buy you anything (both lanes are stopped) and is extremely dangerous (you're cutting off cars approaching fast from behind and braking at the last minute). Never seen this happen in real life, except maybe at toll booths.

On the other hand, there is no lane switching when traffic on adjacent lanes clears up. In real life, drivers will quickly switch if a nearby lane starts moving. They can't see whether their own lane is also clearing up ahead, and most people won't take any chances.

Huh? I see this happen all the time. If people decide the backup is "shorter" over there (i.e. the last stopped car is a few car-lengths ahead) they will absolutely merge into another lane approaching a backup. Same behavior you see at the grocery store.

so collecting superfluous intelligence and racial profiling is the answer.

The thing is, if you wait long enough, CO2 will be removed by the plant life anyway so removing it is "free". However if you reflect the price of the removal process which is as _fast_ as it is emitted to the consumer, someone gonna pay through the nose...

Plants release carbon when they rot or are otherwise eaten. So they're only a temporary carbon store.

Three points on this:

- Increasing total plant biomass increases the amount if carbon trapped in that portion of the cycle at any given time

- When plants decay or are eaten, some of the carbon compounds created are solids. Carbon itself is not the problem, carbon-based gases are.

- Some portion of plant biomass is harvested by humans for durable purposes, such as wood and textiles. These uses hold carbon for much longer.

I don't know what the total affect of these is, but they shouldn't be ignored.

> if you wait long enough, CO2 will be removed by the plant life anyway so removing it is "free"

This is a very dangerous misconception and should not be spread around. It is like saying "I don't have to worry about my emissions, because someone else will clean them up for me". Do you have/support enough plant life to clean up your own emissions?

what part of scare quotes didn't you understand? oh right...

"Long enough" is unfortunately very long because a large part of the fossile CO2 we emit will remain in the atmosphere until it is sequestered back underground by geological processes. These take thousands of years.

That is exactly my point.