Vapymid

To be fair, even according to that study, the problems in rats do seem to be caused by the herbicide and not by the GM crop itself. Of course, as the whole reason for that specific G-Mod (see what I did there? ) was to make the crops resistant to that herbicide so that it could be used at all, it's just as bad from the practical point of view... As to bread - I use both wheat and rye bread, roughly half and half. In general, I am not avoiding any specific food or follow any particular diet. I think as long as you always try to eat a balanced variety of stuff (meat, fish, dairy, greens, fruit etc) and don't overdo on any particular kind - you should be OK (save for the things you are really allergic to). Regards

That sounds like a TEMPEST capability (probably slightly exaggerated), which, ironically, is the NSA's own codename for spying on EM emissions from computing equipment and networks. Yes, precisely. He was a trusted element inside the system. There are other trusted elements - some of them are computers and peripherals. You cannot effectively run any system without trusted components - it just won't work. So, if you compromise such trusted computer or a router - you will gain access from the inside of the system, bearing in mind that most protections are designed to counter a threat from outside. Also, the Snowden's case seems to show that their internal security was pretty lax, anyway. Regards

Do they? We should ask Mr Snowden, I guess... Regards

Your faith in uberhuman superiority of your email-reading, yahoo-sexy-selfies-watching, Merkel-phone-listening spy overlords is as exemplary as it is unfounded. Regards

The difference between us is that you say the locals' knowing participation is required, whereas I think it is purely optional. Regards

Yes. Use the indigenous resources, make the targets work on collecting all that information and bringing it to you. Regards

Yesh, tools are turning against their masters. People just don't want to learn from history. All the time, someone comes up with this brilliant idea despite it having been tried for millennia with the same result and... get the same inevitable result. BTW, now ISIS people also ransacked a nuclear processing facility. Chances are they won't even know what the stuff was, until their hair will start to fall off, but still... A obvious question arises though - wasn't the official idea behind that war in Iraq to destroy all WMD materials, not to hand them over to a bunch of crazy revolutionaries? Regards P.S. The Kurds have obviously decided to strike the iron while it's hot and take control of all the disputed land and facilities while Baghdad prevaricates and procrastinates. And I think Maliki is going the way of Yanukovich...

LOL, this is from 2006 but sounds quite contemporary, doesn't it? b-fssfdTXdU Regards

Ridiculously lame? I do belieff ihre kontinental sens of jumor ist somevot lacking, mein herr. Regards

Most of the information on the internet exists as plain text. Assuming the aliens already have a working knowledge of English, all they need to know to be able to gather that data is ASCII Latin character set TCP/IP HTML Next, they can learn or reverse engineer a common (say, x86-based) CPU instruction set and build a virtual machine on their own hardware. Then they download a pirate copy of Windows, Firefox and FoxIt Acrobat reader and they are all set! They can even get Flash and watch cat videos and pr0n To do the initial decoding and tapping into the 'net they can listen to public Wi-Fi (being wireless it does not even need a hardware interface) and then eventually get a connection. Once they have learned enough about our more sophisticated IT hardware and infrastructure they could attempt sending an underwater probe to tap into a backbone cable (not a trivial job, to cut into a fiber-optic feed, but - hey, they are the ETs!) Regards

Oh, so Ross only gets to eat when he finishes a video? That's what I call discipline! Regards

People are crap at keeping secrets. If anyone knew - that would probably be open secret by now. But what do I know? With enough incentive and the right amount of threat a *very small* number of people could probably keep their mouths shut... But those look down, not up. I won't be so sure. If a GA plane could be flown across the Soviet border at the height of the Cold War and landed in the middle of the Red Square in broad daylight, anything is possible. And we are not even at war with the aliens. The question is how much time. A device that would work for 5 - 10 years without any maintenance can be made easily even by us. That should be long enough, as it will probably become obsolete and will have to be replaced anyway to keep up with the changing technology of the targets. Only if somebody's looking at the right time in the right direction. With aliens being more technologically advanced it would be easy for them to build an interface for our systems, unlike us for theirs. Depends on the alien spooks' brief... No, it isn't. Cloaking can hide you from active search and from being exposed by back-light. Various cloaking concepts, protecting from various wavelengths, have been already demonstrated. No reason for aliens to not be able to develop practical applications. Of course. What you'd want to do is to divert enough of your IR in the desired direction so that the remaining flux will be inconspicuous to a potential observer. Regards P.S. I will be "off-grid" for the next few days, so it may take me some time to resume this conversation. Thanks, it's been my pleasure

Yep! But we seem to be discussing now the possibility that they may be here but we just don't know it. Regards

It is the attitude like that which causes resonance cascades, unforeseen consequences and stuff! You seem to have an unshakable belief that there are lots of people on government payrolls around the world whose job it is to constantly monitor every square inch of visible sky for signs of possible alien invasion and also detect, log and decode every laser beam shone from anywhere on Earth towards the outer space. I can assure you it is not the case. No government agency in the world has resources, budgets and desire to do anything like that. It is easy to hide stuff even here, in front of all the spies' eyes and in the big black space you currently can have a fleet of Star Destroyers parked in the asteroid belt and nobody will suspect they are even there. Again, I would like to point out that to have a capability to discover an exoplanet is not the same as being able to search and detect transient targets, just like having a powerful microscope does not mean that you can use it to find, count and monitor every bacteria around you. On technology, your objections are valid but they assume the technological level of Daleks. Even now we can do better than that - we can build machines that can work for years without maintenance, why would some aliens, who have already managed to cross the interstellar space to get here, not be able to? All of the fancy technology I used as examples (cloaking shrouds, directed comms, laser heat dumps) is feasible based on what we know today. The concepts have been postulated and a lot of principles has even been demonstrated. In a hundred years or so we will have it become commonplace here. And I haven't even mentioned more exotic stuff like entanglement and teleportation, which more advanced extraterrestrials may as well have already implemented technologically. Having thought further about our theoretical alien observers I think I would put at least a couple of their probes into the NSA - they will then have access to intercepted comms on the global scale. I would get all of my probes to tap into the internet so that they could pass their data to those which are landed in a remote location (say in Africa) where there is no risk at all that their transmissions can be detected. The probes can scavenge the power from the local grids, which will minimise the need for onboard generation. I would also put some cloaked transponders in orbit right next to some defunct parked com satellites. They will never be spotted there and it will cut the required transmission power for the land based primary probes. Sounds like good fun. We can write a whole SciFi novel like that Regards P.S. I have really taken your criticism of my laser heat dissipation idea to heart. You say it doesn't work like that - can you explain why do you think so? P.P.S. Actually, it is not my idea at all. The first I read about it, I think, was in David Brin's "Sundiver"

OK. If I were them I would place autonomous probes *on the surface* near the most interesting targets. The probes would gather the data and directionally burst-transmit it at regular intervals to listening posts in the asteroid belt. There I would, in addition, place some *large* passive sensors which will collect long range sigint and register and track anything leaving out of or arriving anywhere on to an Earth orbit. From the Asteroid belt I would directionally burst-transmit the data to a relay station in Kuiper belt. None of my assets will use any form of propulsion, except in emergencies. Not mass spectrometry, it's impossible to do it from a distance. EM spectrometry (including radio, IR, visible, UV, X-Ray and gamma) and interferometry have to be used. These planets have the benefit of having a great shining floodlight behind them, which lets us see enough light to detect any signals (dipping intensity, doppler drifts, gravitational microlensing etc). AFAIK, very few planets have so far been detected by direct imaging and those are all extremely hot giants. All lower mass planets are being discovered indirectly. All of it involves long observations with large or space-based telescopes with very small field of view and not suitable for sweeping search. In my scenario they will only appear at that distance on very few occasions. For landing the probes they don't need to be hidden - they will just look like meteorites as they fall. For short-term detailed observations of the events of interest they can be shrouded and use the perturbation theory to change their orbits with very short and low-power bursts (if, of course, they don't use some kind of gravitic propulsion, in which case they can fly around at will). Why not? This is a basic technique of lasing, demonstrated in 1950s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_pumping - you use light (which can be IR) to excite the gain medium of the laser. As for heat and photons - *any* radiation of heat is done via photons, there is no other way to do it AFAIK. Regards

I think you may need to radiate some accumulated heat, directionally or otherwise Maybe you should first define your alien spooks mission parameters and then we discuss? Otherwise, you are moving goalposts every time. You are saying the aliens can only observe the Earth from not farther away than the Moon, yet Nasa can magically spot them anywhere in the Solar system (with the very same NASA being constantly surprised by asteroids passing unexpectedly between Earth and Moon). We can't see even our own spacecraft from Earth unless they actively transmit. We have just lost a big aircraft right here on Earth and no one can even say remotely where the frack did it go. Extrasolar planets are being detected, yes, but because they affect the light from their stars and we can indirectly deduce that something must be there. We know we must have thousands of asteroids in the Solar system which have not yet been found and most of those already discovered we only observed a couple of times each. Every one of them can potentially house an alien observation post and we have no chance in hell to detect it, unless by pure chance. Our telescopes don't even have the resolution to see asteroids' surface from Earth, neither in optical nor in IR. Basically, there is no escaping the fact that there may be hundreds of alien ships, bases and stations in the Solar system without us knowing anything about them. I am not saying they are here but they may be and we should not overestimate our abilities to detect them. Regards P.S. I don't see why you are so categorical about lasers - if you design a laser that can be pumped with IR radiation from the internally collected waste heat, it will then radiate it out as a coherent beam which will be virtually undetectable unless it is directed at you. OK, we don't have this now but we started from the assumptions that the alien's technology is more advanced than ours...

Ah, OK. For close-range stealth, you can direct and focus the exhaust away from expected detectors; directionally radiate waste heat using lasers; use cloaking devices for quasi-transparency and resistance to active detection. If you keep your ship on station for long time for surveillance purposes you don't need propulsion as you can place it in a solar orbit and the heat management then should not be difficult even with our existing technology - put your station inside a much larger asteroid and the excess heat radiating away (given the surface area of the shell asteroid) will be negligible even without the gimmicks like lasers etc. Regards

If I am, that escapes me Regards

The stealth in space is provided by the sheer distances involved. The inverse-square law of attenuation of radiation means that relatively low-energy source like an engine exhaust will not be detectible at anything like interstellar ranges. Regards

Agree, generally. However, ISIS are not leaders - for now they are the tools. There are people with local power who became frustrated with the central regime and decided to unleash "the dogs", perhaps, to force the issue of the country's break up and to carve out their piece of it. The main problem though is that in such situations, the tools have a habit of getting out of control and turning against their "masters". We'll have to wait an see. @Seattleite - if you meant "military-industrial" under "military" in you previous post then I agree. Regards

There was a slight chance of Iraq continuing as a unified country a couple of years ago when a Sunni-Shia coalition, Al Iraqia, almost won the elections. In fact they did win but then the Maliki clique fixed the election results and reinstalled themselves as the ruling party (with the US, unfortunately, closing their eyes on these shenanigans). When that happened, it became clear that the country is not going to stay intact. Regards

Well, there are no US troops in Syria and no Iranian troops either in Syria or in Afghanistan. It is unlikely that the US troops will meet Iranian troops on the battlefield in any foreseeable future, if ever. I think you are being somewhat unjust blaming it solely on the military. The military needs to fight someone, it's their way of self-preservation. As long as there are threats and wars, they get the funding. Therefore, the military will gladly go wherever and whenever the politicians would send them to. But it's the politicians who are setting the military up for failure by sending them to fight unwinnable wars. Regards

And?...

Me too... if they ever finish it, of course. Regards

I think you'll find that governments have always monitored Tor ever since it or its predecessor-anonymisers have been invented. "Terrorism" is just an excuse for cracking down that little bit more. As a rule, governments in the West don't fear terrorists very much (chances of a civil servant or a minister being killed by a terrorist are practically non-existent), they fear of their own general population much more. Actually, terrorists make a very handy stick for the governments to beat their citizenry with. It's a low cost, high return tool - hardly anyone dies of terrorism if you compare, say, with deaths from car accidents, but we give our governments anything they ask for if they say it is needed for protection from terrorism... It's not new either - just like "international brigades" during the Spanish Civil War, for example, fighting on both sides of the conflict. This is not unique to Islamists too. It seem that all ideologies at some stages of their existence go through a violent expansionist phase when their adepts use the original ideology as a criteria for "with us or against us" selection. These usually have very little connection (other than purely ritual and superficially formalistic) with any philosophical aspects of the hi-jacked ideology and their main purpose seems to be to justify the abandonment of moral rules and constraints for the adherents during the conflict. In this way they can legitimise and rationalise the wanton atrocities and destruction they commit in order to achieve their ends, which are normally fairly unrelated to any matters of faith but have underlying local economic, ethnic and political causes. Regards