Slashdot Mirror

For the more visually inclined, a graphical map.

And based on that, I'll give dollars to doughnuts that it's Egypt. Virtually all traffic between Europe and Asia transits through the Suez canal.

I'd agree with this analysis because there were some massive interuptions with middle eastern internet comms when the SEA-ME-WE_4 cable was apparently snagged by ships at anchor of Alexandria. Interestingly, Egypt actually arrested 3 men for cutting though cable off Alexandria in March this year. makes you wonder what they were actually doing.

Well, considering that his mother drank a lot during pregnancy, perhaps it's less surprising.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23780581

(Not saying that changing gender is morally wrong or anything like that, but clearly there's something physically wrong if you think you don't belong in your body...)

The Met loves Brazilians.

A good comparison will be seen when Sgt Robert Bales get his sentence for killing 16 civilians in Afghanistan. Then we will see how hard of a crime is leaking secrets when compared (in a contemporary justice system) to killing more than a dozen people.

Big Shitstorm.

More recently at Fukushima: Japan nuclear agency upgrades Fukushima alert level

It's moot now: they've upgraded it to Level 3.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23776345

Citation needed. Who said anything about them "deliberately" misusing Safari's broken features? Maybe you just pulled that part outta your ass?

Google was fined for tricking itself around "do not track" and "block third party cookies". The details are in the second url.

It's been revised up to level 3 now, apparently (the wording seems a bit awkward and tenses conflict):

Japan's nuclear agency has upgraded the severity level of a radioactive water leak at the Fukushima plant from one to three on an international scale.

But Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority proposes elevating it to level three on the seven-point scale.

Japanese reports say it is a provisional move that had to be confirmed with the IAEA, the UN's nuclear agency.

This week is the first time that Japan has declared an event on the Ines scale since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

The move was announced in a document on the agency's website and was subsequently approved at a weekly meeting of the regulatory body.

Oh, and this is interesting in an unhappy way:

Teams of workers at the plant have surrounded the leaking tank with sandbags and have been attempting to suck up large puddles of radioactive water.

But, reports the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Tokyo, it is a difficult and dangerous job. The water is so radioactive that teams must be constantly rotated and it is clear that most of the toxic water has already disappeared into the ground.

Posting anon to preserve mod points used in this thread,

Maow

Critics claim that Germany is paying six times as much for power, to finance all the renewables. (Per that article, 18 billion Euros paid on power that has a market value of 3 billion Euros) See also the Wikipedia article on Renewable energy in Germany.

Presumably though this is an investment and the renewables will keep providing power once their costs have been paid fully. I'm wondering if, over the operational lifetime of the solar and wind power equipment, they will wind up producing enough power that they will have actually been a good investment?

IMHO it would make more sense for them to keep the nuclear power plants and try to shut down coal plants, but that's not their plan.

It's also possible that Germany taxes energy use deliberately in an attempt to decrease consumption.

They ARE taking legal action: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23764632

The warning level was actually raised to level 3: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23776345

Japan's nuclear agency has upgraded the severity level of a radioactive water leak at the Fukushima plant from one to three on an international scale.

Or to put it another way, if he wasn't a journalist then wtf did they detain him for 9 hours for?
There would be no point unless he was acting in the capacity as a journalist.

Lets see, his partner Mr. Greenwald (the one actually reporting on Snowden) thinks :-

Mr Greenwald said the British authorities' actions in holding Mr Miranda amounted to "bullying" and linked it to his writing about Mr Snowden's revelations concerning the US National Security Agency (NSA).

He said it was "clearly intended to send a message of intimidation to those of us who have been reporting on the NSA and [UK intelligence agency] GCHQ".

He told the BBC police did not ask Mr Miranda "a single question" about terrorism but instead asked about what "Guardian journalists were doing on the NSA stories".

Intimidating the 'enemy' seems to be the point.

Here are the numbers from the chart on page 4:

Electricity production: first seven months 2013

Uranium -- 52.1 TWh
Brown Coal -- 85.1 TWh
Hard Coal -- 65.5 TWh
Gas -- 23.8 TWh
Wind -- 24.2 TWh
Solar -- 19.4 TWh
Run of River -- 10.5 TWh

Total energy production was about 280.6 TWh, renewable was 54.1 TWh (or about 19.3% of all energy production).

Also interesting is the chart on page 9, "Monthly Production Solar". It is a bar graph, so these numbers are mostly my eyeball estimates:

January: 0.35 TWh (exact number)
February: 0.6 TWh (my estimate)
March: 2.3 TWh (my estimate)
April: 3.1 TWh (my estimate)
May: 3.3 TWh (my estimate)
June: 4.3 TWh (my estimate)
July: 5.1 TWh (exact number)

So winter really is bad for solar in Germany, but other months it isn't bad. Interestingly, wind does better in Winter... chart on page 10, "Monthly Production Wind", same deal as above (mostly eyeball estimates with two exact numbers):

January: 5.0 TWh (exact number)
February: 3.2 TWh (my estimate)
March: 4.7 TWh (my estimate)
April: 3.3 TWh (my estimate)
May: 2.8 TWh (my estimate)
June: 3.3 TWh (my estimate)
July: 1.7 TWh (exact number)

It doesn't look like renewables will be able to produce 100% of power needs any time soon in Germany, but they are producing about 1/5 of all energy. More than I expected.

Critics claim that Germany is paying six times as much for power, to finance all the renewables. (Per that article, 18 billion Euros paid on power that has a market value of 3 billion Euros) See also the Wikipedia article on Renewable energy in Germany.

Presumably though this is an investment and the renewables will keep providing power once their costs have been paid fully. I'm wondering if, over the operational lifetime of the solar and wind power equipment, they will wind up producing enough power that they will have actually been a good investment?

IMHO it would make more sense for them to keep the nuclear power plants and try to shut down coal plants, but that's not their plan.

Did they stop abusing their workforce like they promised? Or is it business as usual?

It was a bit more than just be buried at night:

If proven, they were denied a Christian burial - and instead carried to a crossroads in the dead of night and dumped in a pit, a wooden stake hammered through the body pinning it in place. There were no clergy or mourners, and no prayers were offered.

...at least at first, anyway! You can imagine this would be very scarring to the family and very bad in a religious perspective; suicide effectively gets you excommunicated.

You mean like if agents of the state were positioned in transport hubs demanding to see your papers?

There are safeguards. There are home office guidelines that the police must follow (they must only detain people suspected of involvement in terrorism, for example) and there's an independent reviewer who oversees the application of the law.

At least after a quick glance it seems that the police ignored (or took a very broad interpretation of) the guidelines and that the independent reviewer will be holding a triple-cunting when he meets the Metropolitan Police Service. One can hope.

Schedule 7 has been revised (no more than six hours of detention, "suspect" must have a lawyer) and the new version is going through parliament now, so that's something.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23763625

Actually there are no safeguards. The law states that it can be applied without any suspicion that a person is a terrorist and that refusing to answer questions is a crime. The powers granted under that law can be used on anybody for any reason whatsoever. The law is that broad. The police didn't abuse the law. They simply followed a law that had its abuse built in.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23757133

Unless you play football.

More like a corrupt, incompetent intelligence community.

but it does happen. In the UK some police have taken to wearing very obvious cameras, partly to protect the policeman and partly to add evidence where necessary - can cut down on expensive trials and paperwork if you can play back the footage to the suspect once he's been caught. It also acts as a deterrent, apparently, though I figure a policeman in the area does that, they don't need a camera if they're there.

These have been used openly since 2006 in some areas.

Good to see your outrageously rude (fuck, stupid, bullshit, propaganda, fuck) reply scoring +4 while my facts-based post somehow now is a troll.

Windturbine changing weather patterns is well-studied and well-known. That's just a fact (which apparently you cannot deal with). Now we don't really make use of wind power on that large a scale so this effect is rather small, but it is also very real. Note the effect works both ways; while my image shows increased cloud cover, cooling the earth, Texas is apparently heated by wind turbines.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17871300
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16115.full

Similarly, getting cold water from the deep ocean will have effects as well, like heating up the ocean must more efficiently than global warming can achieve by itself. And when done on a large scale, these effects may be rather large as well. We'd better think about them beforehand unlike we did with the whole fossil fuel debacle.

Also, obviously the effects of wind turbines as well as deep ocean heating are - for now - extremely small compared to the impact of burning fossil fuel. So they will only work as a pro-oil/coal argument to people that somehow lack logical reasoning skills. Like you apparently.

We're not going to solve the whole anthropocentric climate-change problem if we are not prepared to think about how our actions influence nature and climate. I can understand you'd rather not do that since it apparently makes your view of the world more complex than you can handle. I personally'd rather follow a more scientific approach, which requires taking such effects into account.

I can't help but associate nutjobs like these with folks like al-Shabab, who, in trying to "save" Somalia from the West, have managed to reintroduce polio there.

Here you go: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/climatechange/2009/05/911_contrails_study_challenged.html

> > Being a good person is something that will always be good for you.
> Demonstrably not true

Indeed (clearly not *always*), though I consider it poorly worded than just 'not true'. IINM, there was recent reports showing that being selfish is not good for you in terms of evolution (or something like that) - yeah, a bit like Spock said, I suppose.

Oh, I even have a reference : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23529849 ...but, yes, YMMV, to say the least.

Or scanners. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23588202

1. People who take hand-written notes often later transcribe them digitally, thus going over the notes one more time than people who just record them digitally in the first place.

2. Studies have that reading harder-to-read fonts assist in recall/retention. Hand-written notes certainly fall in the category of harder-to-read.

Blizzard's main priority with World of Warcraft is getting people to keep paying their subs, and to do this they make the game as engaging as possible. This goes against that by both managing to destroy the sense of immersion by dragging gamers out of their game world, and also by forming a link in the player's mind between Warcraft and real-world scenes of suffering. Not a connection that most players will want in their recreation time.

Where things may work better is where it's possible to both turn the work itself into a game, and also to wrap it in an appealing layer to stop it having too strong a connection in the player's mind with the reality behind it. An example of this would be the recent Facebook game developed to help identify some genetic factors in Ash tree dieback, as detailed in this BBC News story. Here the presentation is cute, and the focus is on making it a game. The only problem I could see here is that I can't see how it's cheaper/more efficient to develop and serve the entire content for even a simple game compared to just doing the pattern matching in a more traditional manner, but for other tasks I could see it working.

The basic idea is there though, make the work part of the game rather than making it a task which detracts from the game. Something which this story doesn't seem to recognise.

You don't need to be so bold. Just put the BBC, Sky News, and a few other conventional media sites on there. Maybe add the official Parliamentary web site. After all, there must be something some people would regard as "porn" somewhere on those sites.

Doing a blanket block is too obvious. Make it selective. As selective as you like. As if being "selective" would solve the problem. Then maybe people will get the point that being selective *IS* the problem.

[lawl - the captcha is "hubris"]

Just looked it up, it was a housewife called Diane Gould. http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_6460000/newsid_6467800/6467889.stm?bw=nb&mp=wm

Good thing there's no tracking of citizens going on in London now.

You know, Thomas "She Blinded Me With Science" Dolby. The synth genius.

Yes, it's a real bloody tragedy that your kids can't access Facebook in China, like they can in Canada.

Try downloading the MP3 versions of the BBC's "In Our Time" with Melvyn Bragg. They make a downloadable MP3 available as well as streams. As an aside. In 2000 I started ripping NPR streams from Real Networks when I was in Moldova. I used "Total Recorder" which I still use from time to time to grab interesting streaming content. I had an aux jack in my Lada Niva's after market CD system. I would plug my 64MB (or was it 32MB) Creative Nomad MP3 player into the jack and rock NPR's All THings Considered as I tooled through Moldova and Eastern Romania. It was a bit of effort to make the audio so I did it only for longish trips. Even my wife was impressed, which is saying something.

Like releasing the same document twice, with different redactions? http://www.aljazeera.com/humanrights/2013/08/2013851618340986.html
Or information on an Iraqi shooting? http://gcn.com/articles/2005/05/13/pdf-user-slipup-gives-dod-lesson-in-protecting-classified-information.aspx
Or when the TSA published their 'classified' handbook? http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/tsa-leak/
Or when the UK revealed their nuclear submarine secrets? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13107413

Does anyone remember when the press covered stuff like this?

It was second from the top on http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ this morning:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23627656

Does anyone remember when the press covered stuff like this?

It was second from the top on http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ this morning:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23627656

There have been quite a bit of effort to do population-control in many countries but there are quite a few idiots working against it.

Christianity:
http://churchandstate.org.uk/2012/12/the-catholic-church-condoms-and-hiv-aids-in-africa/
Islam:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/islamethics/contraception.shtml - Leaders talking against any.

Generic regarding contraception and religion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_birth_control

Here you have a pope claiming that condoms are infected with aids:
http://www.irinnews.org/report/75412/mozambique-condom-mythology

Then you have all that crap in regards to abortion, in both Islam and Christianity....

On top of this you have this thing where people just have to have a male offspring and they will continue until they have.....

Some reasons for big families in Africa:
http://povertynewsblog.blogspot.se/2009/12/reason-for-desire-for-big-families-in.html
Summary "Historically families where big to be able to take care of the farm. When people moved to cities the urge to have many children still remained"

Another thing that can cause families in developing countries to have big families is that they don't have any care for the elderly there so they have many children so someone can take car of them when they get to old.

If religion could stop interfering with sex-education for people (both kids and adults anywhere in the world) and also stop spreading lies. (no. I'm not gonna start a flame-war here, i was just referring to the example with the pope that said that condoms can give you aids)

3 things are needed for population-control:
- Sex education. This should start before puberty.
- Provide affordable or free contraception. (condoms, pills etc)
- I know this is really bad, but if someone wants a male or female offspring allow them a free check and abortion if it's not a match. (It sounds cruel, but look at how many abandoned female children there are, how many that are actually killed after birth etc.)
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/01/16/it%E2%80%99s-a-girl-the-three-deadliest-words-in-the-world/

Actually the NHS is one of the most efficient healthcare systems in the world - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10375877

Or at least it was, before this current Tory government started to destroy it and sell it all to their friends in the private healthcare sector. The more private sector involvement, the less efficient it is. That has always been and still is the case.

The only article that even seems to come close is one from the Daily Mail. As usual they do not cite their sources nor do they get commentary from anyone but an alarmist charity.

How about some actual citations?

Well, since you don't like the Daily Mail reporting stuff, you won't follow this link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-189451/Neglected-patients-went-blind.html

But what if the same story is at the Telegraph?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1437054/Optitians-blame-patients-loss-of-sight-on-targets.html

And what about the BBC?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3085105.stm

Are they making up stories too?

Please, what argument are you going to use to defend the honor of the NHS in this argument?

The costs of hiring 2x the admins, consultants and experts to clean up after all the cyber action.
The costs of hiring 2x the new vetting staff after http://rt.com/usa/probe-company-cleared-snowden-022/
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/06/18/nsa_buddy_system_director_keith_alexander_tells_congress_how_the_nsa_will.html
~a costly new No Contractor Left Behind Act.
With todays fast adsl, adsl2+ modems and some having friends with hybrid fibre coax or even optical, twentysomethings are way more effective than the 56k users of the past.
With a better understanding of Perl on the upgraded Windows Vista and 7 units, todays activists might see more than just the airbrushed NASA PR images - they might ftp out that moon flag fluttering clip this time.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/4977134.stm

The BBC reported the same:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23487928

Car break-ins using it are already in the news:
http://www.today.com/news/police-admit-theyre-stumped-mystery-car-thefts-6C10169993
http://jalopnik.com/whats-the-secret-device-thieves-in-california-are-usin-471782175
http://news.msn.com/science-technology/high-tech-car-thieves-break-into-vehicles-without-leaving-a-trace

Here is the device built using the same code these researchers discovered:
http://www.vag-info.com/BMW%20Group%20products.htm
and a video how to use it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVmPfCFFkqQ

That and they keep digging bodies up from his garden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria#Sexual_assault_charges http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b012wjcx/Russia_The_Wild_East_Series_2_The_Secret_Speech_Scramble_for_Power/

According to this article, the app can cause the toilet to repeatedly flush,

So is this a DDOS (Doody Denial of Service)?

Old news

A good comparison is the BBC's iPlayer app. After a year it's just starting to reach parity with the iOS's initial version in features and video quality. The development team is 3x the size of the iOS version. That still doesn't fully take into account the extra support costs they incur from Android users, which they say is significantly more than iOS.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20754182
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/posts/Video-on-Android-Devices-Update

And if you're targeting tablets, with iOS having the vast majority of the market share until recently (and still retaining the vast majority of the online usage share), why WOULD you spent multiples of your costs to address a small and expensive market? Perhaps if they current market share numbers keep up and turn into installed base share, and the average user is using at least ICS versions of Android, it'll make sense to re-evaluate their decision.

A good comparison is the BBC's iPlayer app. After a year it's just starting to reach parity with the iOS's initial version in features and video quality. The development team is 3x the size of the iOS version. That still doesn't fully take into account the extra support costs they incur from Android users, which they say is significantly more than iOS.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20754182
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/posts/Video-on-Android-Devices-Update

And if you're targeting tablets, with iOS having the vast majority of the market share until recently (and still retaining the vast majority of the online usage share), why WOULD you spent multiples of your costs to address a small and expensive market? Perhaps if they current market share numbers keep up and turn into installed base share, and the average user is using at least ICS versions of Android, it'll make sense to re-evaluate their decision.

So what you're saying is the BBC employed poor developers and augmented them with more poor developers?

No that's the excuse you're trying to make, based on nothing.

The BBCs reason is very specifically the fragmentation of the Android platform. Both OS and devices.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20754182

Anyone who thinks fragmentation is a problem for Android is not an Android developer

The BBC developers do. As do various others that we can confirm have real apps in development. There's no evidence that the claim that there's no fragmentation problem comes from anyone who actually develops. Just fanboys.

Let me put this in more explicit terms for you.

Is this enough to understand why his "5,000 years" statement is nonsensical?