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That's very interesting. Of course, so is this: http://i.imgur.com/zHPLIan.jpg

AC, as you are an expert on irrational, unfounded statements could you please explain the rational behind this:

http://i.imgur.com/zHPLIan.jpg

But it's okay to advise people to commit suicide? Not the sharpest tool in the box are you.

I fview Sarkeesian as a professional victim hustling for funds, and hence the darling of the SJWs who aspire to her level of solvency, but in this particular instance I'd like an explanation for this: http://i.imgur.com/zHPLIan.jpg

Google needs to clean up misleading apps in their search and stop malware instead of profiting from it.

Look at the ads for Firefox.

http://i.imgur.com/piER06h.png

It's the same for other apps, like Skype etc.

I wonder what else will surface in this story?

http://i.imgur.com/zHPLIan.jpg

Oh gosh, look the screenshots of her evidence tweets came twelve seconds after the tweets themselves, from someone who was not logged in and hadn't done a search.

Almost as if she'd created the account, threatened herself, logged out, hit the back button on her browser, and taken the screenshots just in time for the release of her new video. Never you say? What motivation could she possibly have to pull such a damselling fraudulent stunt you ask? Maybe the over €150,000 of donations she got last time perhaps?

I personally prefer the NTSC filters over those hqx filters because it breaks the "blockyness" without creating weird "vectorlike" artifacts, also it looks more authentic.

Why not make Pi = 3 while they are at it?

silly, everyone knows Pi = 4

http://i.stack.imgur.com/GU8wd...

(suhhhhsh! i know the answer, but if Ohio can't recognize the problem with this bill they won't recognize the problem here either, and we can use that to differentiate them from the rest of society. start talking with someone, and they aren't making logical sense ask them what Pi = and if they say 4 you know why)

I've made a feminist robot.

Meanwhile back in the real world men are sexually assaulted and raped by women just as often. Rape culture my arse.

Remember DOS? Starting MS DOS 3.30, Please enter new date, please enter new time, C:>\, done in 3 seconds. No bullshit.

Remember Netscape 3.04 Gold? I got it running yesterday on this very PC, here is a screen shot. I wish the web stayed backward compatible for basic text, and then add all the shebang as ignorable extensions, carried to a principle, but there are massive forces pent up on making you abandon old stuff, so you keep BUYING new stuff, as you doing so is their bread and butter. They have absolutely no issues in fucking you over if that means bread on the table for themselves, so so much for principles like backward compatibility.
Oh yeah, the screenshot - check out Netscape 3.04 Gold running on this bitch yesterday: http://i.imgur.com/i9WtAK2.png

"There's a humongous fungus among us." -- Zoidberg

Many of the delays in fusion research can be attributed directly to inconsistent funding.

As this chart makes clear and should be part of every fusion discussion.

By the way here is a screenshot of Netscape Navigator 3.04 still running fine on the computer, but barely crawling around on the Internet in 2014. http://imgur.com/i9WtAK2

PS. By luck I happened to capture Winamp at 108 and 42.

108 = 1^1 * 2^2 * 3^3 and it's a magical number used as the number of beans on a Buddhist rosary for Om Mane Padme Hum. That beats the Catholic rosary of 5*10 Hail Mary's + 5 * Our Father's + 4 * Intro ~ 60 Items.

And for 42 (101010 in binary) see http://www.independent.co.uk/l... I first learned about it in a linux MOTD. See customizing MOTD's with BOFH excuses, such as shown at http://www.linux.com/learn/tut... and http://bofh.ntk.net/BOFH/ .

PS.PS. I wish XP had a similar option, that instead of a graphical logon, you could log in to pure DOS, like in the Win95 days, and type Win to get into the GUI, but when you exit to console, it would remove the GUI processing overhead and leave you with something very minimum and text like, that would work well for things like a cashier machine. But that's what linux is for. Or used to be until they got it too complicated. In any case, I still can't find a selection of speedy and user friendly apps for linux (or even newer versions of Windows) comparable to what's available for XP. Security is an issue, but with Zonalarm killing everything including ctfmon and whatnot. it's halfway manageable. It's still a busy process with frequent XP reinstalls for any Internet connected devices. If you can afford not to connect something to the Internet, like a workstation made to create music or CAD or read offline pdf files off a portable disk, you don't have to constantly reinstall. But that's what my reinstall computer looks like, and I can't really replace it with anything Linux has to offer for now, on the app and feature part. I mean Konqueror 3.5.10 had features better than Windows Explorer. but it plain sucks in copy speed, and qt4 and 5 based stuff is even worse, and it has weird features I don't like. And I got Super Flexible File Synchronizer for the deficiencies that Windows Explorer or Windows Backup lacks for backing up the data like an emusic mp3 or downloaded ebook pdf to a portable disk, right before a wipe and reinstall. Now wait til Microsoft buys Super Flexible, and messes it up too. But they do have. or used to have some really good software. Like I'd put MS Office 97 with sp1+sp2 on this computer if I did not constantly wipe and reinstall it. as Office Excel is better than the Works Spreadsheet that does not allow you to bang up some VBA macros to massage your data. But I find that I don't need macros most of the time, so it's not worth the bother.

I'm not sure if you read the article and checked the block page screen shot, I did. The University spokesperson stated that it was not a block and the student could log in. The image has no option to bypass or go to a next step, it's a block.

Next, the spokesperson claimed that the policy only applied to staff at the University. Reading their AUP there is no such restriction to staff, and in fact the first paragraph includes students. Northern Illinois University information technology resources, including the electronic communications network (NIUnet) on the NIU campus and off-campus education and research centers, computers attached to this network, and any associated computational resource or service are for the use of persons affiliated with Northern Illinois University, including faculty, staff, emeritus personnel, and students in good standing. Emphasis mine.

The spokesperson may have been confused (or simply dishonest) as later in the same paragraph a justification mentions employee ethics as a "justification", not an inclusion or exclusion. Information technology resources are provided by the university to further the university's mission of research, instruction, and public service. The use of these resources should be consistent with this mission, this policy, and the University’s other use, security policies, and other applicable regulations including the State Officials and Employees Ethics Act (SOEEA). Again, emphasis is mine.

The AUP is not legaleze, and can be read and interpreted without much difficulty.

Sure, it's possible there was a network F*ck up or something else which cause the student to receive the block. That said, if the student agreed to this AUP the University is within their rights. I have modified numerous customer facing AUPs, they are always reviewed and approved by legal before consumption. If the University claimed to have released this AUP "on accident" or "with accidental content" I would call bullshit.

If their intent was not to censor content for students, the AUP needs to be scrapped and re-written to exclude students from the policy. Obviously they also need to correct their censoring software to exclude student computers and networks and ensure that it's only censoring content for faculty.

Obligatory.

The Government did not invent roads. Roads existed long before the Government made them, in fact most towns and cities had roads without a Government mandating and taxing people for using and building them.

Surveying a road, grading and maintaining it always comes with a pretty stiff price tag.

Local roads and bridges were traditionally paid for by taxes, tolls and contributions of labor and materials.

Long distance travel by car was damn near impossible before the US federal government became directly and deeply involved. [untitled photograph] [

This article from 2 years ago and its accompanying chart make a good case that we'd have fusion already if we as a civilization seriously funded it. As you can see on the chart, actual funding towards fusion research has been laughable and of course, here we are still "30 years away".

Yeah, this is what they looked like in the 90s.

http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg

Pretty much covers it, even with the speculative forecasting. The money put into it is equivalent to throwing the spare change you have in your car's ashtray toward a new car fund every year.

Let's talk about a couple of the memes:

You forgot one: I definitely would NOT hit it. Just look at those sharp knees. She is way below my standar|

Fark doesn't spare anyone. Even its own privileged white males.

>I was trying to figure out how to turn on focus-follows-mouse in Ubuntu,

1. You can't even /do/ "focus follows mouse" or "sloppy focus" in Windows.
2. You're doing it wrong: http://i.imgur.com/46fP493.png
3. You find 3 ways to do it, pick the worst one, and imply that's the one that users have to do.

Idiot. Troll.

--
BMO

While I agree that it's a fool's errand trying to reduce CO2 emissions without a large-scale reliable zero-CO2 baseload power source, I'm not convinced that CO2 emissions by Germany and Europe at large are going to increase in the future. The data seems to suggest a downward trend and while I do think that this trend will hit definite limits unless the generation side is radically addressed (and what the Germans are doing isn't going to cut it, for various other reasons), it isn't entirely obvious simply from trend data. In order to claim that CO2 emissions from these places will rise, you need to make some pretty broad technical assumptions and I'm not prepared to commit to firmly.

Now as for whole-world CO2 emissions, there the historical data is much more clear: emissions will continue increase unless something really drastic is done.

While I agree that it's a fool's errand trying to reduce CO2 emissions without a large-scale reliable zero-CO2 baseload power source, I'm not convinced that CO2 emissions by Germany and Europe at large are going to increase in the future. The data seems to suggest a downward trend and while I do think that this trend will hit definite limits unless the generation side is radically addressed (and what the Germans are doing isn't going to cut it, for various other reasons), it isn't entirely obvious simply from trend data. In order to claim that CO2 emissions from these places will rise, you need to make some pretty broad technical assumptions and I'm not prepared to commit to firmly.

Now as for whole-world CO2 emissions, there the historical data is much more clear: emissions will continue increase unless something really drastic is done.

https://i.imgur.com/Zl836nj.jp...

The wind is always blowing somewhere

No, it isn't. When are you going to stop denying data and start acknowledging there's a problem?

not to mention that the earth's core is always hot

Then if geothermal is sufficient by itself for several days (see graphs above), why build wind & solar in the first place?

gravity never stops working

Gravitational potential energy cannot be used as an energy source.

Clearly if you build enough renewable energy it can meet any imaginable demand

And quite clearly, if you cared to look at actual grid data, you'd see that it can't, at least not from intermittent sources.

The wind is always blowing somewhere

No, it isn't. When are you going to stop denying data and start acknowledging there's a problem?

not to mention that the earth's core is always hot

Then if geothermal is sufficient by itself for several days (see graphs above), why build wind & solar in the first place?

gravity never stops working

Gravitational potential energy cannot be used as an energy source.

Clearly if you build enough renewable energy it can meet any imaginable demand

And quite clearly, if you cared to look at actual grid data, you'd see that it can't, at least not from intermittent sources.

Pumping water reservoirs is done all over Europe, without flooding vast areas, as it simply uses already existing glacial areas that were created by similar processes to begin with.

Except there are nowhere near enough of those natural reservoirs available for any appreciable amount of large-scale storage, hence why there are projects like Jachenau, Osser and Atdorf. All of these installations are constructed by excavation of a large volume of elevated mountain terrain, reinforcing it with concrete and leak-tight materials to prevent natural embankment weathering and/or catastrophic dam failure and flooding them.

Newer designs actually promise a lot more, given the ever advancing march if science.

No advancements in engineering and materials science can ever hope to circumvent the laws of physics. Flywheels are simply an extremely shitty way of storing vast amounts of energy long-term. For frequency regulation, okay. But for storing TWh's worth of energy, it's insanely expensive. This is the Beacon Power (who went bankrupt, btw) Stephentown flywheel energy storage and frequency regulation plant that can store all of 5 MWh worth of energy (about 1 large wind turbine for 1 hour). Meanwhile, in reality, in order to be able to smooth out solar production, you'd need at least 3-4 day's worth of nearly the whole freakin' grid's power. Just to store one 1GW nuclear reactor's equivalent production for one day you'd need about 5000 of such flywheel storage plants.

These are not made up figures. Here I've taken actual whole-German power production figures from Dec 2013 and blown them up 5x simulating a buildout of their current ~35 GW of wind & ~30 GW of solar installed capacity to insanely high levels (to a total of 325 GW of nameplate installed capacity - actual current total nameplate installed capacity in Germany is ~180 GW) and analyzed the shortfall. It'd still require ~550x the largest pumped hydro storage plant that exists in Germany (Goldisthal, which cost a cool 600 mil Euros, so just multiply to get a feel for the capital cost on top of the 5x wind & solar buildout). I didn't even need to be very picky about the month, as the same situation repeated itself on the very next month of Jan 2014. Now imagine you wanted to meet just 10% of this storage requirement using flywheels - that'd be on the order of 466 GWh, or about 100000 of the Stephentown flywheel energy storage plants, taking up ~1000km^2 just for the freakin' plants.

So energy storage seems a dynamite idea, but it's only when you start to run the numbers that you begin to realize the scale of the problem involved and how laughable some of the proposed solutions are.

As for the shuttle, to split hairs, I never specified it stored the flywheel energy for electrical purposes. Reaction mass is energy, too. But I yield to your point, that I should have been more specific. The main point was, that it can store energy for weeks without significant losses, anyway.

You're not splitting hairs, you're just covering your ass for being dead wrong. At no point did the shuttle use flywheels for any kind of energy storage or energy source. Just admit that you were wrong and move on.

Even Liquid salt reservoirs with just 6h of time are already enough to cover a night during the shorter nights of the year.

Have a look at the graphs of power production graphs I posted above again. I didn't make these up, they're actual production figures. Then understand that 6h doesn't even begin approach the

Pumping water reservoirs is done all over Europe, without flooding vast areas, as it simply uses already existing glacial areas that were created by similar processes to begin with.

Except there are nowhere near enough of those natural reservoirs available for any appreciable amount of large-scale storage, hence why there are projects like Jachenau, Osser and Atdorf. All of these installations are constructed by excavation of a large volume of elevated mountain terrain, reinforcing it with concrete and leak-tight materials to prevent natural embankment weathering and/or catastrophic dam failure and flooding them.

Newer designs actually promise a lot more, given the ever advancing march if science.

No advancements in engineering and materials science can ever hope to circumvent the laws of physics. Flywheels are simply an extremely shitty way of storing vast amounts of energy long-term. For frequency regulation, okay. But for storing TWh's worth of energy, it's insanely expensive. This is the Beacon Power (who went bankrupt, btw) Stephentown flywheel energy storage and frequency regulation plant that can store all of 5 MWh worth of energy (about 1 large wind turbine for 1 hour). Meanwhile, in reality, in order to be able to smooth out solar production, you'd need at least 3-4 day's worth of nearly the whole freakin' grid's power. Just to store one 1GW nuclear reactor's equivalent production for one day you'd need about 5000 of such flywheel storage plants.

These are not made up figures. Here I've taken actual whole-German power production figures from Dec 2013 and blown them up 5x simulating a buildout of their current ~35 GW of wind & ~30 GW of solar installed capacity to insanely high levels (to a total of 325 GW of nameplate installed capacity - actual current total nameplate installed capacity in Germany is ~180 GW) and analyzed the shortfall. It'd still require ~550x the largest pumped hydro storage plant that exists in Germany (Goldisthal, which cost a cool 600 mil Euros, so just multiply to get a feel for the capital cost on top of the 5x wind & solar buildout). I didn't even need to be very picky about the month, as the same situation repeated itself on the very next month of Jan 2014. Now imagine you wanted to meet just 10% of this storage requirement using flywheels - that'd be on the order of 466 GWh, or about 100000 of the Stephentown flywheel energy storage plants, taking up ~1000km^2 just for the freakin' plants.

So energy storage seems a dynamite idea, but it's only when you start to run the numbers that you begin to realize the scale of the problem involved and how laughable some of the proposed solutions are.

As for the shuttle, to split hairs, I never specified it stored the flywheel energy for electrical purposes. Reaction mass is energy, too. But I yield to your point, that I should have been more specific. The main point was, that it can store energy for weeks without significant losses, anyway.

You're not splitting hairs, you're just covering your ass for being dead wrong. At no point did the shuttle use flywheels for any kind of energy storage or energy source. Just admit that you were wrong and move on.

Even Liquid salt reservoirs with just 6h of time are already enough to cover a night during the shorter nights of the year.

Have a look at the graphs of power production graphs I posted above again. I didn't make these up, they're actual production figures. Then understand that 6h doesn't even begin approach the

http://imgur.com/a/OLfQ5 Interesting, but probably a bit more work than you wanted. But I liked the flip up set up.

Let's see what Gary Larson has to say about this.

And the spurious crap like [...] wind power is too intermittent

Indeed, who could ever present such slanderous accusations? Oh wait, how about actual grid measurements? (Aggregate German whole-grid performance numbers from Dec 2013 broken down by source.)

Getting the computations right tells us to phase out nuclear power as too expensive

Sure, it's just that stupid reality that keeps fucking up Amory's love story.

I've found myself in this exact situation.

If you have the desire and/or ability to use your computer properly and automate tasks, and your job title is "______ Assistant", your boss will likely not respect you enough to permit automating anything. Therefore, you should do it as quietly as possible, and do not expect any pats on the back for mysteriously having perfect reports in your boss's inbox every morning at 8:31AM, or data requests completed before he/she even has time to walk back to his/her desk. Your boss may "expect" perfection, but will not actually know what to do about a subordinate who is actually capable of delivering it.

Expect to have only Microsoft VBA at your disposal. And amuse yourself daily with this image which sums up your situation perfectly!

Also, smile often! :)

Since 'the incident' the police is knocking on doors of young couples living in the Fukushima area and in the fall out zones north east of it, telling the couples: " you know, you should consider to have no children" (Or move away to the far south or Hokkaido)

Can you actually show this, or is this just the latest of the tall tales making its rounds on the anti-nuclear blogosphere? And anyway, even if it did happen in some form, all it would show is that people are afraid and giving each other potentially poor advice. It doesn't show that they're at actual substantial risk of harm, otherwise you could go around telling everybody to stay indoors to prevent them from being run over by cars (you know, this we can actually show to happen).

In Chernobyl the death toll over all is estimated to be a million, roughly. /. posters claim it was 3 or 5 ...

Ugh, not that rag again. Yablokov's publication is a book, not a peer-reviewed scientific paper. It contains tons of errors and was translated and pushed onto the New York Academy of Sciences by known anti-nuclear crazies who aren't above outright falsehoods (like their assertions that Fukushima killed 15000 people in US in the initial 14 weeks after the accident, even though their data is trivially shown to have been manipulated and utterly bogus; Mangano is often seen publishing together with another crazie, Sherman, and they've even been torn a new one by an avid linear-no-threshold-supporting researcher). The Yablokov publication has since been criticized by the NYAS and they've distanced themselves from it. The short story is that the NYAS' reputation was co-opted as a vehicle to fluff up the credibility of an utterly bogus piece of non-scientific writing by anti-nuclear activists.

I witnessed 1986 about a few ten thousand ... it was news every day on TV. I really wonder how people in our days with straight face claim only a few people died.

Oh my, so if something's on TV, it is truth! Well fire the scientists then, obviously all we need to do to determine fact from fiction is to listen to the daily news cycle. Fox News will be pleased.

Luckily the initial disaster in Fukushima was far away from this. However the long term issues we only will know in 30 years ... plus.

Even assuming the fairly uncontended (mainly in anti-nuke cycles) linear-no-threshold dose response model, according to actual peer-reviewed studies, on average we'd expect ~250 excess deaths over the years with an upper bound of ~2500 (and that's assuming no evacuations). Was the accident harmless? Certainly not. Should TEPCO be made to compensate people for their troubles? Absolutely! But this fear mongering using junk science is in no way different to global-warming deniers and 9/11 truthers simply ignoring scientific facts to meet their political agendas. Do be like them.

Since 'the incident' the police is knocking on doors of young couples living in the Fukushima area and in the fall out zones north east of it, telling the couples: " you know, you should consider to have no children" (Or move away to the far south or Hokkaido)

Can you actually show this, or is this just the latest of the tall tales making its rounds on the anti-nuclear blogosphere? And anyway, even if it did happen in some form, all it would show is that people are afraid and giving each other potentially poor advice. It doesn't show that they're at actual substantial risk of harm, otherwise you could go around telling everybody to stay indoors to prevent them from being run over by cars (you know, this we can actually show to happen).

In Chernobyl the death toll over all is estimated to be a million, roughly. /. posters claim it was 3 or 5 ...

Ugh, not that rag again. Yablokov's publication is a book, not a peer-reviewed scientific paper. It contains tons of errors and was translated and pushed onto the New York Academy of Sciences by known anti-nuclear crazies who aren't above outright falsehoods (like their assertions that Fukushima killed 15000 people in US in the initial 14 weeks after the accident, even though their data is trivially shown to have been manipulated and utterly bogus; Mangano is often seen publishing together with another crazie, Sherman, and they've even been torn a new one by an avid linear-no-threshold-supporting researcher). The Yablokov publication has since been criticized by the NYAS and they've distanced themselves from it. The short story is that the NYAS' reputation was co-opted as a vehicle to fluff up the credibility of an utterly bogus piece of non-scientific writing by anti-nuclear activists.

I witnessed 1986 about a few ten thousand ... it was news every day on TV. I really wonder how people in our days with straight face claim only a few people died.

Oh my, so if something's on TV, it is truth! Well fire the scientists then, obviously all we need to do to determine fact from fiction is to listen to the daily news cycle. Fox News will be pleased.

Luckily the initial disaster in Fukushima was far away from this. However the long term issues we only will know in 30 years ... plus.

Even assuming the fairly uncontended (mainly in anti-nuke cycles) linear-no-threshold dose response model, according to actual peer-reviewed studies, on average we'd expect ~250 excess deaths over the years with an upper bound of ~2500 (and that's assuming no evacuations). Was the accident harmless? Certainly not. Should TEPCO be made to compensate people for their troubles? Absolutely! But this fear mongering using junk science is in no way different to global-warming deniers and 9/11 truthers simply ignoring scientific facts to meet their political agendas. Do be like them.

Corrosion.

This has been essentially resolved very early on:

An out-of-pile corrosion test program was carried out for Hastelloy-N which indicated extremely low corrosion rates at MSRE conditions. Capsules exposed in the Materials Testing Reactor showed that salt fission power densities of more than 200 W/cm3 had no adverse effects on compatibility of fuel salt, Hastelloy-N, and graphite. Fluorine gas was found to be produced by radiolysis of frozen salts, but only at temperatures below about 100 C.

Operating it will also be a nightmare. Can you put a diver into molton salt to fix things?

What the? Why would you go for a dive in a super-heated radioactive salt at above 500 C? Below ~400C the salt solidifies, so no, you can't go dive in it any more than you can go for a dive in a salt mine. Moreover, I think you misunderstand the design of the core region of most molten salt reactors. They aren't great big tanks which you can move around in. Most are designed as a series of narrow tubes which the salt is pumped through, lined by moderator (typically graphite), all surrounded by a neutron reflector (usually heavy steel). Molten salt reactors are projected to be cheaper precisely because they don't require super-large forged pressure vessels. Regardless, even fairly large (in terms of capacity) PWR pressure vessels aren't really that big that you'd send a diver into it, even assuming anybody ever did that (fuel is loaded by crane from the top while the pressure vessel is open and completely submerged in water).

"expected effect: increased fossil fuel emissions due to sporadic running". Not sure what this is supposed to mean.

There are many problems with running thermal power plants, especially those with large boilers, sporadically, because they have lots of thermal inertia. For example, a lignite power plant has a minimum output level of ~30% - that's just a limitation of the thermodynamics of the system. If at a given point there's too much renewable capacity on the grid, the plant operator is forced to shut down completely. If, however, at some later point, say 6-8 hours later, renewables lapse again, the coal plant operator is told to perform a restart, but with a large coal plant it's not that simple to just load in new coal and throw in a match. They need to reheat the furnace, because otherwise the coal just won't burn. To reheat say a 600 MW lignite plant takes ~100000 liters of fuel oil - that's vaporized and blown into the furnace and burned and only after that the first coal can start to come in. All of the created CO2 and extra cost for the plant operator goes up the smoke stack and hasn't produced a single kWh. This is true, though to a lesser degree, for CCGT as well - large thermal inertia of the boiler and reheat system that is lost every time it's shut down and restart. The only guys who don't suffer from this significantly is OCGT, but they have terrible CO2 emissions per kWh compared to CCGT.

That Germany did not improve its CO2 emission despite a massive investment in renewables is primarly because they decided shut down nuclear power first rather than coal. A reduction is expected for the future when renewables start to replace fossil instead of nuclear.

If you have a look at the CO2/kWh graph I sent you, you'll notice that the reduction trend line starts in 1990 and the renewable buildout somewhere around 1999 and it hasn't really had much of an effect on the figure. In fact, when I do a linear fit on the first derivative of the CO2/kWh data, it appears as though the reduction trend will be slowing down an

http://imgur.com/CoMAUCw

My point is that France's electricity is cheap because the government pays so it cannot be used as argument why nuclear is cheap did.

Care to demonstrate this? Also, Germany's renewable sector is also heavily subsidized, so even if I accepted that France's electrical production (not R&D - that's a whole different story) is subsidized, you could at best say that both countries do production subsidies. Even then the French are getting the better end of the deal with lower rates.

An LFTR is an *engineering* nightmare.

I presume you've worked on LFTR engineering then? Can you name some of the engineering nightmarish points?

while renewables are already competitive and getting cheaper every year.

Oh really? Without a guaranteed feed-in tariff and market distortion by forcing the grid operator to take renewables first and make the rest of the traditional generators pay for their intermittency? I had a look at a fairly large project in Germany, Solarpark Meuro and it is quoted at 140 million Euros for the first 70 MW installed. Naively you'd recalculate that to be 2000 Euros per kW, compare to nuclear (which costs more per kWh) and declare victory. Except that's not an honest comparison. Nameplate capacity on a solar plant is not the same as on a nuclear plant due to capacity factor. Solar in Germany has CF ~0.15, whereas nuclear is >0.9, often even 0.95. So to replace one nuke plant kW of capacity you'd need to install ~6x that amount in solar, so it's no longer 2000 Euros per kW, it's more like 12000 Euros per kW. But the story doesn't end there. Solar isn't dispatchable, so you need to add the cost of backup storage into that. And when it's winter and your solar insolation drops by a factor of 5-6x, your solar system is again effectively completely useless and you need yet another plant to produce (so potentially yet another X-amounts of kW to backup your solar array). And then when these things are diffuse and in different locations (solar good in the south, wind good in the north and presumably storage somewhere in the middle) you'll need transmission capacity. etc. etc.

These dishonest price per MW of installed nameplate capacity comparisons really bug me, because those making them don't understand that they're making a dishonest comparison.

Economically, investing in nuclear is a poor decision.

So just for kicks I've taken data from IEA's CO2 Highlights 2013 catalog (+one real-time data point for 2013 from RTE) for France and plotted them against data from Germany's Umweltsbundesamt and this is what you get. Notice how the renewable share (and that includes hydro) gets larger faster than CO2 per kWh decreases? In recent years, in fact, it has jumped up, because the German grid is experiencing an expected effect: increased fossil fuel emissions due to sporadic running. Even if we extrapolate out to 2056 you'll see that German CO2/kWh is still ~2.5x higher than present-day French emissions (and the French are working on lowering those even further - this year they've announced they managed to halve it by running fossil plants less & running nuclear and hydro plants more).

The second graph is taking data from co2benchmark.com for all European countries for the year 2008 and plotting their CO2/kWh emissions versus various energy sources and their compositions. If you have a look at the R^2 factor you'll notice that the strongest correlation for CO2 reduction is nuclear + hydro (exactly what France is doing). Comparing the contribution of REs (without hydro) & nuclear energy alone gives you a much clearer picture - nuclear is much more strongly correlated. If you take the one outlier for REs out of the picture (Finland) the situation gets much worse, with RE cor

Yeah, I keep saying this too. For comparison: http://imgur.com/g0eYPCc this is my allowance for my mobile with Three (a mobile provider in Ireland). It's called unlimited (but I guess they put in a figure of 2 TB in the field just to put in something. I regularly pass the 50GB mark and never heard a complaint from them.

I can't say for certain it influenced people, but I'm happy to and regularly do recommend my provider to people looking for a good provider. It might be intentional that Three never bother me, because as one of their customers who uses a disproportional amount of data, I act as an ambassador for them. Very recently, during the Steam summer sale, I almost hit 100GB in a month downloading newly bought games. Not a peep out of Three.

Perhaps you should look into multiple accepted meanings for a word before you further embarrass yourself with ill-informed commentary.

I wanna see the armor plated Tyrannopenguin.

http://i.imgur.com/Tkhwh.jpg

And it doesn't help Israel in the least when the pro-Israelis repeatedly lie their asses off.

Above AC should be modded as informative as it highlights the social media aspect mentioned in the summary.

And it doesn't help Israel in the least when the pro-Israelis repeatedly lie their asses off.

Lots of text editors are garbage. Notepad++ looks amateurish, or do you think that any professional program would name one of its tabs "MISC."? Sublime Text is not any better as it does not have proper configuration dialogues at all (a proper graphical program should have). Vim and Emacs have some cool features but the keybindings are unnecessarily unintuitive. If those two didn't have the hacker legacy and they were invented today, no one would use them. I surely am an angry man. :D

You're right. Who would think that they were stating facts when they say things that are clearly opinions like "Sometimes the facts are pretty scary."

Kindle?

Why not put a Geforce Titan in a 2U server and use a Rift.
It'd be like this guy, but in a smaller space.

Sometimes the people in the different color uniform are acting like animals, these animals are killed, not murdered.

Enemy combatants are not murdered,

The intentional death of a human being is always murder.
Societies then create moral and legal exemptions to allow murders that the people consider necessary.

Sometimes the people (in uniform) dehumanize the enemy to make it easier to murder them.
It's an extremely ugly road to go down: http://i.imgur.com/riixJyL.jpg
And I'm not exaggerating: http://i.imgur.com/ODMmE5i.jpg

I'm glad we're civilized enough to have stopped making dehumanizing propaganda the official government policy.
I hope you can catch up with the civilized world.

Sometimes the people in the different color uniform are acting like animals, these animals are killed, not murdered.

Enemy combatants are not murdered,

The intentional death of a human being is always murder.
Societies then create moral and legal exemptions to allow murders that the people consider necessary.

Sometimes the people (in uniform) dehumanize the enemy to make it easier to murder them.
It's an extremely ugly road to go down: http://i.imgur.com/riixJyL.jpg
And I'm not exaggerating: http://i.imgur.com/ODMmE5i.jpg

I'm glad we're civilized enough to have stopped making dehumanizing propaganda the official government policy.
I hope you can catch up with the civilized world.

The rules are designed to try to prevent embezzlement

So...the rules designed to prevent spending more money than necessary that would end up in the pockets of people who'd have no business getting their hands on it in a sane world...cause more money than necessary being spent and ending in the pockets of other people who'd have no business getting their hands on it in a sane world? *double facepalm*

From the last time we had this discussion: http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg

I was just trying to be funny and make a comment on the popular press always predicting fusion was just 30 years in the future. The chart is quite useful and would like to mod your comment as informative but I cannot comment and moderate at the same time. Thanks for your input.

From the last time we had this discussion: http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg