Slashdot Mirror

The fact is that a massive number of genetic mutations in a population within a few generations from something like ionizing radiation or some other agent does not lead to greater fitness, but almost inevitably to lesser fitness; deleterious morphological changes (ie. malformed wings, eyes, internal organs) and increase in various cancers.

That is not a fact, that is a scaremongering theory that was popular directly after the Chernobyl incident. A quarter of a century later we have quite a lot of facts rather than FUD to look at.

Wildlife Thrive in Chernobyl's No-Go Zone
Despite Mutations, Chernobyl Wildlife Is Thriving
Wildlife defies Chernobyl radiation
Wildlife thriving after Chernobyl’s nuclear disaster – study

Yes, individuals might die and suffer horribly. (It might be hard to find bad mutations since they are often eaten at early age.) but the benefits from having a zone humans avoid outweighs this when we look at population strength.
If the Chernobyl disaster is any indication then the Fukushima disaster is a blessing for Japanese wildlife and the result we will see in a couple of decades is not a "population much less fit to related populations outside the environment that caused this."

In this we disagree. Because the goal of the politician is power, not capital.

I'd say both; desiring capital is as much part of human nature as desiring power, and politicians need to be actively dissuaded from pursuing it by efficient and strict anti-corruption laws and the enforcement thereof. You know you're really in deep shit if the system instead incentivizes the pursuit of money, like, say, if politicians need to raise mountains of cash to afford brainwashing an apathetic population into voting for them.

Not trying to be conspiratorial, but why is it Occupy Wallstreet, Julian Assange, and now "hacker culture" all get accused of sexual assaults? What is the connection? Or are certain people in certain social networks more likely to commit or be accused of sexual assault?

There are politics involved with hacking, hackers upset a lot of people with a lot of power. Hacktivists in particular. Human rights defenders in particular. What could be worse for a hacker or anybody than to be labeled a sex offender? While it is possible that sexual assaults are going on, we also have a correlation with the majority of hackers being young males (there are females but we don't hear much about them), and what we see happening is the landscape for hackers becoming much more militarized, much more political, and much more dangerous.

My advice is that anyone in the hacker community both men and women should take some time to discuss how to protect both women from being sexually assaulted and protect men from being falsely accused as there will a probability of both occurring with increasingly greater frequency.

Sources:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4od4QQVK1o
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18519380
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ngF4V-TOUI

That's what I did.

I got a spare plank of wood left over from some cabinet work in the kitchen, square-ish in size and a bit bigger than my back, and plopped it right between me and my cushion. I can adjust it to a vaguely upright position(good for typing), or reclining according to my mood(browsing, watching videos etc), and I am sure my back is mostly straight rather than curving in to the cushion and going all humped.

Oh, and I got a smaller cushion for my neck/head. Make sure their is no neck strain, or it's all pointless.

Alternatively, read this BBC article, they recommend a 120-135 degree angle for a chair:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6187080.stm

Here's what I think - hospital reclined bed position with the fancy anti-bedsore mattresses, if patients can survive that for hours, office workers can. The usual office chairs and fancy "modern ergonomics" are bullshit[1] - it's amazing how after thousands of years of making chairs, decent comfortable ones are still so expensive.

As for that standing fad, there's plenty of evidence that prolonged standing causes problems. Simple rule of thumb, if it hurts don't keep doing it for a long time.

Keep in mind the minimum amount of exercise to maintain reasonable health, supposedly short high intensity exercise is more time efficient. I won't be surprised if it's true - since most animals don't spend hours fighting or running. It's just a short high intense burst up to a max of a few minutes, then
a) either they die or they survive to live another day.
b) they catch and eat what they are chasing for dinner.

So put it all together and perhaps we should recline while doing "office work", then every now and then walk about for a bit and then do very fast sprints. ;)

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6187080.stm
Seems to imply they only tested up to 135 and said it was least pronounced at 135. While it does show that sitting up straight does put more stress (despite those stupid claims of sitting up straight being good), if they didn't test 180 (or more) then their study is still flawed isn't it?

So from the point of view of every one else outside the US, Obama is a somewhat right-of-center candidate, and Romney is basically Hitler. So yeah, we root for Obama.

That could also mean that Europe is dominated by leftism? When you find it normal to arrest a person for saying that "homosexuality is a sin", then you are quite leftist, yes?

People forget that the Left nowadays if very focused on feminism, abortion, affirmative action, immigrants; people think that a country is "right-wing" because it has private banks... They have missed the whole New Left development.

1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/7668448/Christian-preacher-arrested-for-saying-homosexuality-is-a-sin.html
2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-12598896
3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/7952526/Last-Catholic-adoption-agency-faces-closure-after-Charity-Commission-ruling.html

Oh, of course. There is no rest of the world, the ocean simply falls off into space about 2 miles off the coast of America.

Because foreign countries don't have entities which prohibit distribution (read want $$$$)? BBC iplayer requires you to be in the UK. I guess the rest of the world doesn't exist to them either... I am unable to watch many streaming services auf Deutch due to my geolocation. I guess the rest of the world doesn't exist to them either? My choice in recommendation was based on the assumption that the GP is American. Perhaps if he was speaking Korean another recommendation would be in order... where is your recommendation?

TLDR: Licenses, how do they work?

Worst and most terrifying science fiction? NOW http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19169023

Thing is, I'm actually rather against Islam myself (or really anti-religion in general, just seeing Islam as the most dangerous and aggressive of the bunch at the moment)

How strong is that dislike for religion?
Do you agree with churches having an active voice in society (see link 1 below)?
Do you agree with the legally-enforced marginalization of Christian viewpoints on family values (see links 2-6)?
Do you believe in conspiracy theories involving Jews or Opus Dei?
Does Mitt Romney's or Rick Santorum's religion bother you?
Do you support the right of a valedictorian to pray?

I found your comments well-balanced, except for this one. I would like to know your opinion on this matter.

If you find 6 links to be too much, please read at least links 1 and 2. I guarantee you will find them informative.

==Links==
===Church-state balance===
1. "Why Church and State Must Be Separate" by Benedict XVI, http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/ratzinger2.html

===Legally-enforced marginalization of Christianity===
2. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/7668448/Christian-preacher-arrested-for-saying-homosexuality-is-a-sin.html
3. "Christian foster couple lose 'homosexuality views' case", http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-12598896
4. "Last Catholic adoption agency faces closure after Charity Commission ruling"
            http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/7952526/Last-Catholic-adoption-agency-faces-closure-after-Charity-Commission-ruling.html
5. "Defining Religious Liberty Down", http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/douthat-defining-religious-liberty-down.html
6. "Controversy over Heaven" http://www.crisismagazine.com/2011/controversy-over-heaven

Can't believe anyone from the UK hasn't replied yet - June was literally absurd in terms of rain here - Where I live, we get an average of 12 inches of rain per _year_, distributed evenly between the months, on average.

Over in England, We have had the wettest April through June since our records began [BBC News]. Please send us some sunny weather!

You'll have to wait for the Olympics to finish... there's no fun having them on sunny weather.

Ex-sceptic says climate change is down to humans

"The results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature are in and Richard Muller, the study's director (formerly an AGW skeptic) declares, 'Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.'

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html?_r=4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19047501

CEO Exxon admits AGW is real and burning fossil fuels causes it.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/06/27/exxon-ceo-climate-energy-fears-overblown/

The natural progression:

• 1. There is no such thing as global warming!
• 2. Global warming is theoretically possible, but it's not happening.
• 3. Global warming is happening, but we are not the cause
• 4. Global warming is happening and we are the cause but it's no big deal.
• 5. Ok, we should probably do something about this global warming before it gets worse.
• 6. We're really fraked now.

We are now at step 4.

Over in England, We have had the wettest April through June since our records began [BBC News]. Please send us some sunny weather!

Well we might not be able to send any sunny weather over, but we're making a pretty good effort at stalling the Atlantic thermohaline cycle. That'll stop your rain for you.

Over in England, We have had the wettest April through June since our records began [BBC News]. Please send us some sunny weather!

A famous study you never heard of - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/background_briefings/smoking/86599.stm

This kind of result is quickly covered up.

We do know that smoking is the greatest single cause of statistics. But if you want your study funded you better be prepared to come down on the side of conventional wisdom.

There have been several more recent studies that back this up. I think one Dutch study indicated that smokers cost an average of $325K from age 20 to 80 whereas non-smokers cost almost $100K more. Hell, even obese people cost around $50K less. I don't think any of these studies take into account the amount of taxes that smokers pay into the system either. I'm thnking it would have been more patriotic for me to have not quite years ago. ;-)

A famous study you never heard of - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/background_briefings/smoking/86599.stm

This kind of result is quickly covered up.

We do know that smoking is the greatest single cause of statistics. But if you want your study funded you better be prepared to come down on the side of conventional wisdom.

did I say Android didn't run on x86, I meant - nobody does so.

Anyway, with ARM's new Mali integrated GPU chips with ASTC ..... nope, can't think of a reason anyone would want to go non-ARM. Unless they succumb to a bag of cash left under the table.

Amazon is thought to have approximately 20% share in total book sales in 2011, so it may still be fairly indicative of the market as a whole.

Except brick-and-mortar stores don't really offer e-books, and Amazon is a skewed sample as they're pretty much the champion of digital book purveyance. So no, not fairly indicative at all I'd say.

On this recent episode of Open Book on BBC Radio 4 a guest said that ebook sales in the UK account for something like 12-15% of total book sales. He said it was about 40% in the US, and that the UK numbers are pretty fuzzy because Amazon is the only significant player in the UK ebook market and they don't release their figures.

We can try to check this out for ourselves: If we guesstimate that Amazon accounts for 80% of UK ebook sales and (as per the grandparent post) 20% of total sales, and that their ebook sales are 55% of their book sales, we arrive at ebook sales being 13.75% of the total UK market. So this guesstimate lines up with the analyst's more informed effort.

Observation also suggests the same thing. I was in London in the spring and was astonished by the vast number of really good brick and mortar bookstores, far more than any American city I've been to. There's a handful of flagship stores in the US (the Strand in New York, the Seminary Co-op in Chicago, Powell's in Portland) that surpass what you can find in London, but no US city has anything like the bulk and variety of great bookstores that London does. This could just mean that they just haven't gotten around to dying yet, but it seems more likely that there are still very strong sales of hard copy the UK.

How about a this novel idea of "work"? Maybe adults should look for one? :-/

Maybe not everyone can find or keep a job in this economy even if they're trying very hard to. You think that all the people who lost their jobs during the bank induced 'crisis' don't want to be working? Has it occurred to you that when the economy contracts, the number of jobs drops? Has it occurred to you that due to outsourcing of services jobs and shifting of manufacturing out of the country that there are fewer jobs? You think that all the people working part time with no benefits do so because they choose to, or because maybe they can't find a decent full time job?

Have a look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/front_page/newsid_9694000/9694094.stm and tell me that the parents of these families wouldn't rather be working.

Are you aware of the concept of the welfare trap, where the single parent or parents of a family get as much or almost as much being on welfare as they would working a job on minimum wage, but that by being on welfare they can take care of their kid(s) and not have to pay for daycare and much more importantly when you have a family, have medical coverage on welfare than they would working for wal-mart or some other shit company that only hires people part time so they don't have to give benefits?

It's all fine and good to say that everyone should just 'work' but the reality is that when you're trying to raise a family by yourself as single parent or when you can't get a good job that pays enough and provides health coverage, that you just cannot because it would actually be worse for your family.

And if you answer that welfare itself is the problem, then I invite you to go to India or some other third world country where there is no welfare, no social benefits...and see the villages of poor living under bridges, the legions (literally) of diseased and disabled (ie missing body parts) wandering the streets begging..and to think about what life in the US would be like if there were no welfare and no social medicine.

That prediction was of course WAY off the mark...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16409664
Seriously, sometimes you Americans do scare the living crap out of us rest-of-the-worlders..

Here's an example in English:

"Are the Republican candidates all crazy?"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16386176

If you read your own link, you will see that nobody but the Russians even tried to land, and one of
their landers (Mars 3, 1971) lasted 20 seconds after touch down (or was it a crash, nobody is quite sure).
Mars 6 transmitted data on descent, but was never heard from again.

Russian Venus missions landed and transmitted imagess.

So, no, the US is not the only country to put a lander on another planet.

However the US is the only country to put a lander on Mars that survived more than a few seconds.

And the only country with operational experience on another planet beyond simply receiving a few hurried photos prior to
vehicle failure. It should be pointed out that Germany, France, Russia, and a couple others collaborated on the Curiosity lander.

Is it wrong for religious people to have a say in how others live? These did:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19132089

Some people are really sure that they can spot sinners:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/jealous-tennessee-man-allegedly-smacks-girlfriend-a-pic-guy-facebook-page-mitt-romney-article-1.1126074

Oh, trust me, I'm familiar with Wikipedia's rules. WP:BLP. It does not say what you think it says. In particular, the purpose of WP:BLP -- summarized as "Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced--whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable--should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion" -- is to stop improperly sourcing material from appearing in someone's biography; it became Wikipedia policy after someone was accused of being part of a killing conspiracy with no references or other reliable information backing up the assertion, and Wikipedia being shamed in the media for this.

Romney's bullying incident does not violate WP:BLP because the accusations have been made and repeated in a number of reliable sources: Starting with the original Washington Post report and by countless other well-renowned news reporting sources, such as The New York Times, Fox News, the BBC, etc.

WP:UNDUE states that "Editing from a neutral point of view (NPOV) means representing fairly, proportionately, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources." A Google search for "Romney Cranbrook site:news_source.com" and clicking on the first link is how I found the above articles (I put in "Romney Cranbrook" in BBC's search box instead of using Google but got the same results). The only significant reporting about Romney's days at Cranbrook in the mainstream press has been about this bullying incident. Wikipedia's Mitt Romney article violates WP:UNDUE. It violates WP:UNDUE because the only significant view about Romney's days at Cranbrook posted by reliable sources is about his bullying incident. Wikipedia has over 120 words describing his days at Cranbrook but not a single mention of his bullying.

The bottom line is this: There is a group of people who are trying their utmost to engage in Orwellian 1984-style suppression of Mitt Romney's high school bullying incident at the Wikipedia. So far, they have succeeded. This kind of deliberate suppression of information is not Conservative; it is downright fascist. The fact that some moderators here at Slashdot have tried to suppress my postings pointing out this Orwellian behavior does not impress me with this site.

There you go (WRT the lack of customers, not the cause being the venue restrictions)

First, the article talks about politeness as in "fear of hurting others' feelings" and never about raw fear, as in "fear of getting killed". I was pointing out that your comment was off-topic and offensive.

Second, about the "Islam isn't peaceful" part: Islam does have a set of rules about war, most of them seek to "humanize" war and pretty much disagree with the crazy shit that is done in the "name of Islam". The BBC has a summary of the rules.

Last, I do criticize muslims who do crazy shit or muslims who support people who do crazy shit. I do not criticize them for being muslim, but for being batshit crazy.

(And by the way, when I say that I'm not muslim/theist any longer, it's not because I disagree with Islam as a religion (or any other religion in fact), it's just that I stopped believing in God or gods, and the first and most important condition of being a muslim is faith in the existence of God)

These grey areas have a potential for a lot of bigger problems than just sports competitions.

See the sad case of Indian female athlete being accused & arrested for rape and actually being manhandled and mistreated by male police officers for 25 days till court granted her bail.

I don't see why ISPs can't follow suit of the London Olympics and install missiles on customer rooftops. Hell, I'm sure the DHS & DoD would happily give a grant for that here, and Verizon would be delighted to manage them, while Haliburton could do the rebuilding for a fair price when some fool gets brave. Who's gonna use a proxy with a missile on their roof? ...or...we could just use drones. But we've got to do something!

Mostly speculating: the BBC makes extensive use of peering to keep their network traffic costs down. This may mean that it’s too expensive to stream content to foreign countries.

In addition, a lot of the rights agreements the BBC has probably specify that the content can only be broadcast in and streamed to the UK. This may even be the case for programmes produced or commissioned by the BBC directly, as it may jeopardise lucrative foreign sales.

Finally, you only need a TV Licence to watch live television. Catch-up TV (iPlayer) doesn’t require one, so the BBC would be unnecessarily blocking some people if they demanded a TV Licence. Similarly, all radio (even live) does not require a TV Licence.

True that. Nothing more stylish than waiting for your C64 to spool the tape...

Speaking of the devil, I saw this on the BBC re the C64 turning 30.
The video shows the tape failing to load :-)

Did you know that there's not actually much of a difference between the way newborn boys look at faces and blocks and the way newborn girls do?

There was a single study, quite a long time ago, with fairly bad scientific controls (i.e., the researchers were the ones administering the experiment, knew the outcome that they were predicting, etc.) that still holds sway to this day that claims that newborn boys look at objects like mobiles fractionally longer than faces, and that baby girls are the opposite, proving a difference between males and females at the 'nature' level when it comes to interaction in the world. That boys will naturally be better with tools and math and girls will be better with people and relationships, all other things being equal.

It turns out that peer reviewed papers debunking this have come up several times, but nobody cares. Because the assumption has to be that boys and girls are the same, a paper that maintains the status quo is insufficiently interesting to see widespread release. As a result, people keep citing the flawed study and completely pass the new study by (mainly in the mainstream media rather than in the field itself).

Controversy sells. Weird 'discoveries' and statistical correlations sell (e.g., the ratio of a man's index finger to ring finger correlates to aggression; I'm not making that stupid study up http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4314209.stm)

I agree that published work can be garbage; we see it all the time, and I just cited a good example of it. But to ignore hundreds of iterations on the data both through peer review AND experimental reproduction is just putting your head in the sand.

"I was arrested and questioned on suspicion of being a violent lunatic."

Goes with...

"Hitler was trying to kill me" - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6541343.stm and my commuter train route goes straight past Olympic Park. ...except I've genuinely used that one already :/

It's apparently not illegal, but it doesn't stop you from over reacting and preventing people from entering the country, especially when all they're doing is using some UK slang and quoting from Family Guy. Border security even looked through their luggage for shovels.

Caution on Twitter urged as tourists barred from US

That's right. Its the same problem that we're all facing in the airline industry: China, Russia and US oppose European airline CO2 tax.

I'd say tackle the problems in power generation, airlines, passenger cars, land and sea-freight and you've tackled pretty much the whole problem. This can be accomplished by regulating and the input (fuel). Of course the income made from these taxes should go to actually solving the problem then instead of random pet projects from politicians. Regardless, none of this solves India's current problem.

Right now some 600,000,000 are without electric current - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-19060279

"Officials said the northern and eastern grids had both collapsed.[...] It was unclear why the grid collapsed but reports said some states may have been using more power than authorised. Power officials managed to restore the northern grid by Monday evening, but at 01:05pm (0735 GMT) on Tuesday, the grid collapsed again. The eastern grid failed around the same time, officials said. [...] The two grids together serve more than half of India's 1.2bn people."

Is this really the way to go?! Still, thank you India for showing us how it can be done, or?

Call me naïve, while global warming needs fast actions this Indian kind of action may well be too fast.

Ms. Daisy Picking, Mr. Barry Cade, and Les Plack DDS agree.

I guess the researcher for the article hasn't read this story:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16011748

See? That link above is a worthy story for slashdot. It has science.

The story about the outbreak? No FUCKING SCIENCE. or nerds

or vagina

I guess the researcher for the article hasn't read this story:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16011748

"Somalia is a pure free market," one diplomat told me.

Well I wish it was a slap, but:

(a) they point to the fact that two courts found the case merited a conviction, and indicate that this vindicates their original decision to prosecute:

"Following our decision to charge Mr Chambers, both the magistrates' court and the crown court, in upholding his conviction, agreed that his message had the potential to cause real concern to members of the public, such as those travelling through the airport during the relevant time," it said in a statement http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19009344/,

and
(b) whoever decided to bring the case probably still has that box ticked, that quota reached, or whatever else it takes to give a CPS bureaucrat a feeling of job satisfaction -- I'm afraid.

-wb-

Fucking lie.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10364073

Yeah, because the FCC says they were "uncooperative" it must be true. After all, the FCC is part of the government. And the government never lies, right? Right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law

More on BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19009344

I, speaking in a pro-gun tone, actually do not own a gun (lest you count my airsotf toy). However, please allow me to shoot your theory full of holes: I give you Switzerland. Funny, you mention Switzerland in your post, as well. Now, you'll turn and point out that, per capita, there are more guns in the US, with nearly 9 guns for every 10 people, compared with Switzerland's 4.5:10 ratio. Assuming even distribution of firearms, as is strongly infferred by Switzerland's policies, you are correct, a larger portion of the US population is armed. However, that is simply not the case; there are more guns, per-capita, in the US, but this is primarily because most US gun owners own more than one gun. With 65 million registered gun owners in the US and roughly 277 million guns (roughly 311,600,000 people times the per-capita ratio of 88.8% fro mthe resource above), that weighs in at an average of about 4.25 guns per owner, or a 13:4 ratio of guns to gun owners, but only about 20.9% of people actually owning guns in the US. Fewer than Switzerland, by percentage.

You can say that military training, being taught how to handle a firearm, has something to do tiwh Switzerland's reduced gun crime, but honestly, think about that. If you know you're trained, you know you'll hit your target, what's your deterrent? That everyone else is trained, as well. It's not that there are fewer armed individuals, because there aren't, there are actually more. You're more likely to encounter another armed individual in Switzerland than you are to encounter one in the US; more to the point, you're more likely to encounter an armed individual who actually knows how to use their gun in Switzerland. That's one hell of a deterrent. Here, in the US, there's a 4 in 5 chance that your victim doesn't even own a gun, and an even greater chance that they're not carrying, even if they do own; that does not, in any way, act to deter gun crime, like what you have in Switzerland.

That we don't have the same program here, in the US, speaks volumes about our government's intentions. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to piece that together.

You could hear concorde's shockwave from 60 miles. Given that concorde traveled at 53,000 ft (ten miles), well you do the math.

I grew up in southern RI, just north of the spot where the Concorde went supersonic. Every day during dinner, all the plates would rattle in the cabinets from the shock wave of the 5:00 flight. At that distance the boom wasn't audible, but there was still enough subsonic energy to shake the house.

Keep in mind the concorde needs a very long runway and operated at only the largest airports were it would have to wait in line and/or travel a long way from loading to takeoff at low speeds which is very inneficient for a jet engine.

Acording to Wikipedia due to jet engines being highly inefficient at low speeds, Concorde burned two tonnes of fuel (almost 2% of the maximum fuel load) taxiing to the runway.

According to http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5195964.stm the Concorde burned up 94 tonnes of fuel getting from London to New York and a whopping two tonnes simply taxiing onto the runway.

A random google result says a 737 uses 2400 kg/hour in fuel and 1 hour at 485 mph, 780 km/h should get you about 485 miles / 780 km :)

London to Amsterdam is only 221 miles (356 km) so it looks like Concorde as designed in the 50s used more fuel taxiing around as a common jet does in an hour flight

Who? What?

You could hear concorde's shockwave from 60 miles. Given that concorde traveled at 53,000 ft (ten miles), well you do the math.

He's come out with some pretty apocalyptic predictions, such as his 1988 chart showing 3 different scenarios, all of which are looking to be way off the mark.

You're kidding, right. Hansen's 1988 projection for the CO2 release scenario that best matches what actually happened is way off (indeed, it is almost surely within the range of error of the temperature data, particularly after properly adjusting for unpredictable short-term effects such as volcanic eruptions. So if his projection is "apocalyptic," I guess reality is as well.

Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University predicted an ice free arctic by 2015.

Funny how a speculation of one scientist somehow mutates into an absolute prediction. Here's what Wadham was actually saying in 2007: "It might not be as early as 2013 but it will be soon, much earlier than 2040." So a rough estimate of no ice at the height of summer, sometime between 2013 and 2040, and probably toward the low end (estimates of other climate scientists range as high as 2100), probably toward the low end, somehow becomes an absolute assertion that there will be no ice at all in 2015. And how is that apocalyptic? Arctic ice is floating, so it's not as if it will contribute to rising sea level. It will certainly be convenient for navigation. It is important mostly because it is yet another indicator of the warming trend.

And here's [sciencedaily.com] another prediction for some catastrophic sea level rise.

And once again, this turns out to be not a definite prediction, but a warning that there is considerable uncertainty on the high end regarding the speed and magnitude of the sea level rise, and that while the IPCC estimate is about a third of a meter in 100 years, it could plausibly turn out to be three times as large, particularly since the melting seems to be occurring faster than projected. This is, in fact, an honest account of current scientific knowledge. Is this apocalyptic? It will certainly be very expensive to deal with, even if reality turns out to be toward the low end of estimates--expensive enough to more than justify the comparatively modest costs of CO2 mitigation. A lot of people will need to move inland, producing huge numbers of refugees. But do you really consider it to be an apocalypse?

Strangely, I haven't come across them[1], but it looks like they've been around since 2007[2].

[1]Talking CCTV
[2]'Talking' CCTV unveiled in city

BBC journalists managed to do the same thing. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18996377