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World Bank suggests Australia's economy would grow by less than 1%.

No. What the government admits is that their data is incomplete.

As I said, the chief of the FBI admits that the Guardian has better stats than they do:

FBI chief: 'unacceptable' that Guardian has better data on police violence

James Comey tells crime summit that ‘it’s ridiculous’ Guardian and Washington Post have more information on civilians’ deaths at hands of US police than FBI

Read your own cited article and the sentence above. They are clearly using "better" in the sense of a numerical count and **not** the quality of the sampling. Again, good statistics is not about more data points in your sample, its about your sample being a more accurate representation of the total population. Fewer data points in a more representative sampling is better and more accurate than than more data points in a skewed representation of the population. Self-selected data points is a big warning sign of a skewed representation.

So your claim of "superficial is total BS. Even the FBI admits they have worse records. And no, it's not mandatory to report police shootings to the FBI.

Re-read, you are mixing two different points. Its superficial in both the sense of self-selected data points and in the sense that it does not adjust for critical pieces of information like justifiable shootings. How can one use these numbers as evidence of police misconduct when you are not even considering if the shooting was justifiable or not. So yeah, "The Count" is superficial until it addresses these issues. Its methodology and analysis would get a mediocre grade in Statistics 101.

FBI chief: 'unacceptable' that Guardian has better data on police violence

James Comey tells crime summit that ‘it’s ridiculous’ Guardian and Washington Post have more information on civilians’ deaths at hands of US police than FBI

So your claim of "superficial is total BS. Even the FBI admits they have worse records. And no, it's not mandatory to report police shootings to the FBI.

Human genes cannot be patented.

because society places a premium on girls. Boys and men are generally considered to be comparatively disposable. This has deep roots in survival instincts.

A tribe that suffers the loss of to many young women would be unable to propagate itself, efficiently. The harm from that could last generations. The loss of almost all the young males however could be more easily survived. Older males remain fertile longer than females, and one male can easily impregnate large numbers of women. Its pretty simple really.

Our instincts are what they are. We generally instinctively protect all of our children pretty enthusiastically. Giving into our more base desires to afford our female offspring a little extra safety is probably harmless. We have plenty of other instincts that don't fit the environment most of us live in to focus on fighting.

Depends on which society you're talking about. There is a severe dearth of girl babies in both China and India, relative to the population. My no doubt imperfect understanding is that in China this is largely because of the old one child law where boys would be earners and so were more desirable than girl babies, and in India where Hindu requires a boy for the death rites of the parents in addition to the boys being earners.
http://www.scientificamerican....
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...

Remember how Hitler was able to suspend civil liberties in Germany? On February 27, 1933 Reichstag building was burned, which found to be an arson. This led Hitler to accuse communists of the terrorism, and he got Hinderburg to pass an emergency decree to suspend civil liberties. Of course, Germany was in shock and most of the smart educated Germans really thought that this action would protect them from the terrorist threat of communists and anarchists.
That's how Hitler was able to come to power. He came on the power of the fear of the masses, willing to suspend their civil liberties in return for security.

Oh that could never happen in a developed, rich, western country today...
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

The US government does not currently keep a comprehensive record of people killed by police. Instead the FBI runs a voluntary program for law enforcement agencies to submit numbers of “justified homicides” if they choose.

and

Of the 547 people found by the Guardian to have been killed by law enforcement so far this year, 49.7% were white, 28.3% were black and 15.5% were Hispanic/Latino. According to US census data, 62.6% of the population is white, 13.2% is black and 17.1% is Hispanic/Latino.

More than one in of five those killed so far in 2015 - 119 people in all - were unarmed. While 31.6% of black people killed were found to be carrying no weapon, that was true for only 16.5% of white people. This stark disparity has stayed roughly constant since The Counted began publishing at the beginning of June.

On a per capita basis, you're several times more likely to be killed by cops if you're black.

Quoting The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (discussed here):

Achieving deep cuts [in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions] will require more intensive use of low-GHG technologies such as renewable energy, nuclear energy, and CCS.

So, someone who is completely anti-nuclear is in conflict with the IPCC, which is supposed to be the standard for technical consensus, right? It's only those crazy global warming denialists who think they know better than the IPCC.

In this piece by Joe Romm (linked to here by timothy) I think the first step is to note that he's critiquing something over at the Guardian UK site written by James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira and Tom Wigley, Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change (it's distantly possible that you're better off reading something by James Hansen rather than by some guy who actually quotes Mark Jacobson approvingly).

Please note the sub-title on that Hansen piece: "Alongside renewables, Nuclear will make the difference". Joe Romm insists it's likely nuclear power will be just a "bit player", but conceeds we should keep working on it, e.g. he likes research into small, modular reactors. Hansen and company don't dispute that renewables have a role to play, they just insist we can't solve the problem without nuclear. Arguably, the great fight here is over whether we need renewables plus nukes, or nukes plus renewables.

Hansen and company say:

For example, a build rate of 61 new reactors per year could entirely replace current fossil fuel electricity generation by 2050. Accounting for increased global electricity demand driven by population growth and development in poorer countries, which would add another 54 reactors per year, this makes a total requirement of 115 reactors per year to 2050 to entirely decarbonise the global electricity system in this illustrative scenario. We know that this is technically achievable because France and Sweden were able to ramp up nuclear power to high levels in just 15-20 years."

Joe Romm argues:

According to the online database of the International Atomic Energy Agency, France has 58 operational reactors, which took the country more than two decades to connect to the grid! That would be a rate of under three per year.

Actually, 58 reactors over two decades is in fact nearly 3 per year, and that's built by a single country.

Why, that would mean that to build 115 reactors per year we might need the efforts of nearly 40 countries! Oh my god where are we going to find that many?

Seriously: you need to grasp the sheer scale of the problem of decarbonizing the world economy. If you look at what we need to do to ramp up any clean energy source, it's absolutely huge. Take a look at some of the numbers Saul Griffith crunched back in 2009:

Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (Thatâ(TM)s about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) [ ... and so on ... ]

Another version of that talk is here. Anything we do is going to involve incredible magnitudes of rapid construction, and we really need to get started on it.

By the way, Hansen and company did an extended presentation at COP21.

Actually David Bowie was known for leveraging technology in his musical career. Here is the first article that pops up on Google.

I had no idea David Bowie died until I read it here on Slashdot! How come the mainstream media didn't report on this at all in the last 16 hours since it was formally announced?

I don't know where in the world you are. But in my part of the world the media have been talking about little else since early this morning.

It seems they're being rather tight lipped about what type of cancer it was, but rumors prior to his death (and prior to the public admission he even had cancer) claim it was lung cancer.

I'm all for building one (india is working on one) .. one! to see if they can be made safe and commercially viable. But, it's not nearly as safe as enthusiasts claim. And because it's not safe, so far it's too expensive to be commercially viable. And while it consumes some radioactive waste, it produces new highly radioactive waste with much longer half lives which must be geologically sequestered for longer than humans have existed as a species.

http://www.theguardian.com/env...

Peter Karamoskos,
'Without exception, [thorium reactors] have never been commercially viable, nor do any of the intended new designs even remotely seem to be viable. Like all nuclear power production they rely on extensive taxpayer subsidies; the only difference is that with thorium and other breeder reactors these are of an order of magnitude greater, which is why no government has ever continued their funding.'

http://www.nnl.co.uk/assets/_f...
A 2010 National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) report concluded the thorium fuel cycle 'does not currently have a role to play in the UK context [and] is likely to have only a limited role internationally for some years ahead' â" in short, it concluded, the claims for thorium were 'overstated'.

Thorium cannot in itself power a reactor; unlike natural uranium, it does not contain enough fissile material to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. As a result it must first be bombarded with neutrons to produce the highly radioactive isotope uranium-233 â" 'so these are really U-233 reactors,' says Karamoskos.

This isotope is more hazardous than the U-235 used in conventional reactors, he adds, because it produces U-232 as a side effect (half life: 160,000 years), on top of familiar fission by-products such as technetium-99 (half life: up to 300,000 years) and iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years).Add in actinides such as protactinium-231 (half life: 33,000 years) and it soon becomes apparent that thorium's superficial cleanliness will still depend on digging some pretty deep holes to bury the highly radioactive waste.

More here:
http://cleantechnica.com/2012/...

Proponents claim that thorium fuel significantly reduces the volume, weight, and long-term radiotoxicity of spent fuel. Using thorium in a nuclear reactor creates radioactive waste that proponents claim would only have to be isolated from the environment for 500 years, as opposed to the irradiated uranium-only fuel that remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. This claim is wrong. The fission of thorium creates long-lived fission products like technetium-99 (half-life over 200,000 years). While the mix of fission products is somewhat different than with uranium fuel, the same range of fission products is created. With or without reprocessing, these fission products have to be disposed of in a geologic repository.

If the spent fuel is not reprocessed, thorium-232 is very-long lived (half-life:14 billion years) and its decay products will build up over time in the spent fuel. This will make the spent fuel quite radiotoxic, in addition to all the fission products in it. It should also be noted that inhalation of a unit of radioactivity of thorium-232 or thorium-228 (which is also present as a decay product of thorium-232) produces a far higher dose, especially to certain organs, than the inhalation of uranium containing the same amount of radioactivity. For instance, the bone surface dose from breathing an amount (mass) of insoluble thorium is about 200 times that of breathing the same mass of uranium.

Research and development of thorium fuel has been undertaken in Germany, India, Japan, Russia, the UK, and the U.S. for more than half a century.

I'm glad that you are so happy with the cost of electricity. However, I keep reading magazine articles about what a disaster the energy policy in Germany has been, and your one data point does not convince me.

The Economist wrote:

The simultaneous dash to renewables and new fossil-fuel power plants resulted in overcapacity and caused wholesale prices to tumble, which has battered the utilities' profits.

At the same time, the prices paid by consumers have been rising. This is because of the above-market prices guaranteed for renewable energy.

[...]

This means that traditional utilities have turned instead to much more climate-damaging coal for generation. The result is that prices have gone up and the use of renewable sources has expanded, but Germans have ended up emitting more carbon dioxide as a result of the extra coal...

But it gives me no happiness to think that the energy plan in Germany is failing. I hope that it will work out eventually.

What Germany really needs, what everyone really needs, to make renewable energy work is storage. I am hoping for new storage technologies to make grid-level storage practical... the liquid metal batteries from Ambri, or pumped electrolyte batteries, or whatever. The only currently practical technology is pumped hydro, and the energy policy in Germany has led to pumped hydro facilities shutting down. If your energy policy leads to coal plants continuing to operate and pumped hydro shutting down, You're Doing It Wrong.

On the other hand, I am also reading that that companies in Germany are planning to build more pumped storage within a decade despite the current economic disincentives, and coal use is going down. Perhaps it will work out in the future.

I know we don't do this on /. but it'd be interesting to know the source of this.

You can access the original Guardian article by clicking the link "theguardian.com" in the title of the summary.

That statement is semantically identical to: "It doesn't do that because we do it intending for it to not do that."

Yes.

But not "it was done to X, therefor it was successful at X."

As I noted, I was responding to your assertion that simply boiled down to 'it won't work'. I didn't see a need to elaborate any more than you did. It seems pointless to waste time on the semantics of an otherwise useless exchange.

I believe the term you're looking for is "Illustrative," which means "Shows the mechanism in a more complex system by a simplified example." "Misleading" means "draws an incorrect conclusion."

It's misleading because you are misrepresenting the relative differences between the top and the bottom, then using that to present an argument about progressive taxation stating that the top tax rates only need to be a little bit higher because their incomes and wealth are only a little bit higher. Plus there's that whole "tax is for revenue" thing.

It's begging the question. Why is it mind-boggling?

Because it's unintuitive and difficult for most people to comprehend or accept.

What is "skewed"?

Biased in an unfair or unreasonable manner.

How is the increasing income gap different than the increasing income gap that occurred all throughout history?

LOL. From someone who just launched an attack for begging the question, you go on to do exactly the same thing.

The increasing gap since the neoliberals took over the world in the '70s and '80s is no different to previous times, and it will produce the same outcome (social stratification, civil unrest, conflict, etc). That's the point. It *can* be different, because the outcome is a result of policy choices and because we are in a narrow gap in history where the people - rather than a handful of elites - actually have (though rapidly becoming "had") some ability to influence that policy.

Let's ask a bit more on that last one. The income gap across history has widened as GDP per capita has increased; does it seem significant that the income gap appears to have widened more quickly [washingtonpost.com] during a massive spike in productivity [wordpress.com] starting just after 1960?

Actually the late '70s was when productivity increases detached from median income increases. As with most of the big economic problems in today's world, you can thank Reagan and Thatcher for it.

Your argument assumes a widening income gap is bad, and that a flatter income gap is good.

Yes. Because large and increasing income and wealth gaps is something history has demonstrated more than once are bad.

People doing productive work draw a cost.

Which is more than recovered in their output. That's, y'know, kind of the point of PRODUCTIVE WORK.

You have argued that "NUH UH IT'S FREE!" and "WELL WE JUST MAKE THE RICH PAY FOR IT LULZOR!"

I have not. Again with the fallacies.

The rich are not a natural resource.

What does that even mean ?

You're even stupid enough to argue that taxes are not for revenue.

They're not. A currency-issuing sovereign Government does not need tax revenue to spend. This is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact. It is demonstrated every day by every currency-issuing country on the planet.

Let's just shut off all taxes, and see how the government pays for anything.

Same way they do all the time. They create (though I suspect you're the kind of guy who prefers the word "print") the money and give it to people for goods and services.

"There also is not a lot of reason for doubt."

Come back when you're the head of an international commission tasked with figuring these things out.

"That all being said, "mass shootings" are terribly rare" Sorry What? Rare? They are near Daily! Rare compared to what country exactly? http://www.theguardian.com/us-... Because in Britain and Australia, where they got rid of the guns. Mass Shootings = Zero.

Ayn Rand's books provided wide-ranging parables of "parasites," "looters" and "moochers" using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes' labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O'Connor (her husband was Frank O'Connor).

That kinda reminds me of that 60s slogan "In 50 years machines will be so advanced that we only have to work about 10-20 hours anymore. Life's going to be a dream!"

in the 1930s, Keynes thought that we'd only have to work 15 hours per week by now.

Few modern diesel cars meet NOx emission norms in real-world use. See The Guardian for an overview and ADAC's press release for a full graph. The Volkswagens equipped with a defeat device aren't even in the top 20.

http://www.theguardian.com/com...

Egads.

We're a society that happily spends $8 on a latte we drink in under a minute but refuses to pay $1 for a game we'd spend hours on.

Where do you get that idea from? Apple dolled out $10 Billion to app developers in 2014, where is this money coming from if nobody is paying for it?

http://www.theguardian.com/soc...

Carry on, cuntface.

So they won't give to Pakistan what they gave to India, eh? It'd be curious to see where they decided to draw that line, in terms of dollars earned per country.

Depends on circumstances. Sometimes the person judges themselves, for example Taylor Swift's apology to Nicki Minaj. Other times nobody ever judges. I'm approximately using the objective standard: "if the person had fully understood the information they had already been given they would have wanted to behave differently".

VR tech for rule 34 is being obsoleted by sexbots. Why settle for video images when you can defy Mr. Whipple and squeeze the Charmin.

Years ago, Wikipedia stated that the song used in a Battle Star Galactica episode was "Metamorphosis One".
This was in fact wrong. It was actually the very similarly sounding "Metamorphosis Five".
No big deal, so I corrected it, explaining you could simply verify by listening to the source material. And I assumed that was that.

But, the editor reverted it. So I went on the talk page and explained myself.
He basically said: you're probably right, but the problem is, there is a cited source to the webpage of the series director saying it is "Metamorphosis One", and what you're doing is original research.
In the end he made the right call and corrected it.

I just checked now, years later, and it says again on 3 pages that it is Metamorphosis One.
So I corrected it again, I'm curious how long it will last.

My point is : if it takes that much effort from me to get even a small, verifyable fact corrected, why should I continue donating my time to Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is full of cited factual errors, and they give more credibility to random blogs than to primary sources, as Philip Roth found out too.

Faced with a shrinking budget and poor economic conditions, . . .

This can't be right. Every Russian troll everywhere will tell you there is nothing wrong in Russia. The sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and theft of Crimea are having no effect. Everything is fine.

Yet these same trolls can't explain why their banks keep failing, why their biggest quasi-bank, VEB, needs $13 billion to keep itself afloat, why every other week another article comes out, such as this one, saying more and more programs are getting cut or eliminated, why pensioners are having their money allowance reduced, or why, based on current projections, Russia will run out of money before the end of 2016.

Corrupt fascist oligarchs such as Putin will tend to have this effect on a country, especially when the mothers of the Russian soldiers killed invading Ukraine are not allowed to talk about their son's deaths because deaths of soldiers during "peace time" are state secrets.

The longer Russia keeps invading and attacking its neighbors, the more it keeps trying to bully its neighbors, the longer sanctions will stay. The trolls can whine all they want about the sanctions not having any effect, but the louder they squeal the more one knows they're hurting.

There's a reason former Soviet bloc countries have embraced the freedoms of the West rather than the repression of Soviet Russia. They know all too well the indignities and injustice served upon them by Russia. Witness the deportations of Tartars from Crimea, the daily raids on Tartar homes to see if there is any "subversive" material, the refusal by the Russians to allow Tartars to speak their own language or have their own schools.

Russia will suffer until it either dies or changes. Unfortunately the Russian people are too stupid to make change happen.

Even then the similarities with how it was in Germany around 1940 is "interesting".

Like the article Fascist America, in 10 easy steps:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy ([Radical] Islam)
2. Create a gulag (Guantanamo)
3. Develop a thug caste (DHS/TSA)
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens' groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law

Realize that even though the linked article is a bit aged nothing has really changed, the only true difference is that there's no figurehead in the current situation, just a collection of faceless three letter agencies. The true leaders are hiding in the background making it harder to see the team that's really in control. Tracking the lobbyists may reveal some of the fringe influences, but the core don't need lobbyists.

Famous right-wing rag The Guardian had a piece not so long ago on why basic income doesn't work:

http://www.theguardian.com/com...

Give me a break people. This was an accident

No. An accident is when you're drunk and you think you have to fart but you end up crapping your drawers.

When a leak in your natural gas storage facility springs a leak so bad that it makes an entire California town uninhabitable and the residents seriously ill, has already dumped the greenhouse equivalent of a million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and you won't be able to stop the leak until at least March, 2016, it's a fucking crime. They should be frog-marching the CEO and Board of Directors of SoCal Gas in handcuffs right now. Let the hundreds of families that have had to leave their homes indefinitely throw rocks at their heads.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-...

Well first what are the alternatives, coal fired power plants? Here's the real skinny,

The gas company has already told state regulators that it would complete drilling of the primary relief well by Feb. 24, but representatives said in an interview last week that repairing the leak could take until the end of March SoCal Gas pinpoints the site of a leaking well near Porter Ranch

Notice that state regulators , how many rate increases to upgrade infrastructure has the state regulators turned down in the last decade? Regulated Utilities aren't like other businesses, there profits are limited to a percentage of revenues, so normally the more they spend on expenses, the more money they can't give to shareholders; unless the Regulators will not approve the rate increases.

Give me a break people. This was an accident

No. An accident is when you're drunk and you think you have to fart but you end up crapping your drawers.

When a leak in your natural gas storage facility springs a leak so bad that it makes an entire California town uninhabitable and the residents seriously ill, has already dumped the greenhouse equivalent of a million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and you won't be able to stop the leak until at least March, 2016, it's a fucking crime. They should be frog-marching the CEO and Board of Directors of SoCal Gas in handcuffs right now. Let the hundreds of families that have had to leave their homes indefinitely throw rocks at their heads.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-...

So the number of unarmed killings not related to a felony is deserved because "those people" commit crimes?

Why don't you go through the database and actually pick out the kinds of cases you mean?

http://www.theguardian.com/us-...

Now, I'm sure there are a few cases where cops maliciously killed people, maybe even out of racist motivations. But keep in mind that the US has about a million police officers, so a couple of dozen homicides a year by police officers would simply match the murder rate in the general population.

We are talking about unarmed Black people who have done nothing other than contempt of cop or "resisting arrest" when they weren't being arrested.

When a cop stops you, you need to comply or you risk getting shot; whether you're armed or unarmed, black or white, guilty or innocent is, and has always been, irrelevant. Furthermore, the rate at which innocent, unarmed people get stopped by race should match the proportions of criminal suspects, not the proportions of the population; that's because cops tend to stop people who resemble criminal suspects. I have no idea whether people "deserve" this, but it's the way it works.

Would I like to change the system? Of course. For many reasons, I'd like to replace public police protected by public sector unions with private security forces, with full legal liability and financial accountability.

Great book on growth and abuse of police powers

"Are cops constitutional?

Any hypothetical world where police were ruled unconstitutional would descend into chaos, probably rather quickly.

But Legal scholar and civil liberties activist Roger Roots posed just that question. Roots, a fairly radical libertarian, believes that the US Constitution does not allow for police as they exist today. He says police departments, powers, and practices today violate the Constitution's spirit and intent because ''Under the criminal justice model known to the Framers, professional police officers were unknown,' Roots writes. The general public had broad law enforcement powers, and only the executive functions of the law (ex. the execution of writs, warrants, and orders) were performed by constables or sheriff who might call upon the community for assistance. Initiation and investigation of criminal cases was nearly the exclusive province of private persons The advent of modern policing has greatly altered the balance of power between the citizen and the state in a way that would have been seen as constitutionally invalid by the Founders.''

http://www.amazon.com/Rise-War...

LA Police get cartoon LA Times critic fired http://www.theguardian.com/boo... http://cartoonistsrights.org/d... http://www.mintpressnews.com/l...

http://www.scientificamerican....
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...

and on and on and on...

A recent paper shows the majority of psychological studies aren't replicable. So you know, jog on.

Given that 70% of psychology experiments are unreproducible, it's most likely that they have not even found a correlation.

The Kopimashin is illegal in England: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-...

It might be illegal in other jurisdictions as well? And that's kind of the point of building it.

It's certainly not illegal in the US, which is ironic considering that the music industry he's attacking is based in and uses US laws. 17 USC 117(a) includes a limitation on copyright of computer programs that says that it's not an act of infringement to make temporary copies during execution:

(a)Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.—Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner...

Normally, that provision is used to exempt "copies" from a hard drive into RAM during execution, but "copies" from a drive to /dev/null would also qualify, since they're created as an essential step during execution of the Kopimashin, and are not used in any other manner (since they're immediately deleted).

Plus, the UK probably has a similar exemption in their copyright law.

And Microsoft doesn't have to count people connecting to a Windows server or people watching a movie that may have been edited on a Windows machine as users to reach their numbers.

No? Microsoft has a History of misleading statistics of their own.

If you want more examples, you're free to Google it yourself

"how is it you know they have enough to rip the world a new one"

Because they have admitted it:

Martin Van Creveld (Israeli military historian): “We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. . . Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”

And here:

Golda Meir (former Israeli prime minister): "Israel would be prepared to take the region and the whole world down with it... What would serve the jew-hating world betting in repayment for thousands of years of massacres but a nuclear winter?"

"you really need to get back on your meds and stop reading the conspiracy theory boards."

This is not conspiracy theory; it is conspiracy fact. Try doing some research for a change instead of name calling and spewing your ridiculous prattle.

Here are some good places to start:

Samson Option by Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer prize winner.
Mordechai Vanunu by Peter Hounam

The world is being blackmailed by Israel and her "Samson option". Israel poses the greatest threat to the world, bar none.

Sometimes the truth hurts.

The climate constantly changes, always has, always will; so say what you really mean.

OK. The best models we have of climate suggest that anthropogenic gasses emitted into the atmosphere (most importantly carbon dioxide) have the same effect as naturally occurring gasses, and the current best estimate for the warming effect of carbon dioxide is that is causes between 1.5 C and 4.5C average global temperature rise per doubling of concentration.

The effect has been known for over a hundred years. It explains why the Earth is not frozen.

There has been no warming for over 18 years in RSS data,

If you cherry pick the right data. Here you go: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/msu/time-series/global/lt/nov/1mo

The satellite measurements are somewhat inconsistent. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/mar/25/one-satellite-data-set-is-underestimating-global-warming

Actually cold fusion works just fine, and powered the first practical time travel engine. Unfortunately, inevitably time travel leads to paradoxes until the universe (well the one with observers remaining) settles into a consistent steady state as increasingly improbably events take place until the result is no time travel.

Last time it was the bird with a baguette sabotaging the Large Hadron Collider at a critical point in time (ha!). http://www.theguardian.com/sci...

And poor Pons and Fleishmann are victims of the same process. No one (who will be believed) will ever be able to replicate their work. Something will always go wrong.

Oh, and don't try and take advantage of this information to do anything about it. I barely survived the Orca landing on my garage where my experiment was running, and I was 200 miles inland.

That's one of the reasons why I'm having trouble believing TFA. There isn't much skill needed to crack most organizations I've seen.

khasim, I find your thinking on this highly curious: It's easy to hack in there, so the Iranians didn't do it?

Easy to hack critical infrastructure of a country that they call an enemy, one they have aided violent attacks against, ... and they wouldn't do this why? Do you think they just aren't looking, or are somehow insulted by the possibility of an easy and highly damaging attack as being beneath their honor?

Why would it surprise you that someone engaging in hacking investigations wouldn't openly describe all details of how they traced hackers engaging in harmful activity? Surely you recognize that could enable them to better cloak themselves in the future if they knew how they were being tracked or tricked?

Iran has attacked US forces, and directly aided in attacks that have killed hundreds or thousands of Americans. They are one of the chief state sponsors of terrorism in the world. You seem to be both dismissive of that and more or less defending Iran vis, "This reads more like fear-mongering. IRAN IS ATTACKING US! BE AFRAID! EVIL IRANIANS! ". Is there some reason for that?

Give Iran its due. There are many highly intelligent, capable, and dangerous people being used by the extremist Iranian government to target the US and many of its friends and allies. The behavior of the Iranian government terrifies most of it neighbors who are now making large purchases of military equipment to defend themselves against Iran. Iran has been involved in other hacking activity before, and there is nothing about the possibility of preparing for an easy attack on critical US infrastructure that would be out of character for them.

Oops, they did it again.

Iran violated sanctions with missile test, says UN panel

Terrorism is ultimately another bogeyman, and while a problem nonetheless, I believe that we are interpreting a situational cause (the "Great Game" that has practically never ended, resulting in turmoil in various countries and causing more people to look for extremist solutions to impose order) as fundamental (that Islam predisposes people to terrorism, which is contradicted by a study (Lewis, Bernard, 'Islam: The Religion and the People' (2009), pg. 53) finding Islamic jurisprudence to be at odds with terrorism and a report by MI5 finding Islamic terrorists not being particularly religious or irreligious on average).

The fundamental problem is that when you have a lot of young people who either live in or have active ties to a region that has been screwed over for a long time, you are bound to see increasing numbers of people getting angry about it and thus increasing (but still small) numbers of people channeling that anger into horrific acts (which will, of course, be high profile compared to more statistically significant threats), believing those acts to be a solution, and perverting a belief system shared by most other people from the group they believe to themselves to be fighting for to justify them and popularize their cause.

The situation isn't helped by our leading scientific minds having apparently thrown in the towel on rationally understanding the universe altogether, certainly at level of fundamental research in physics.

Personally I think a lot of this is due to our increasingly globalised and homogenised intellectual sphere. In a massively informationally interconnected world, it's not the right ideas and methods which tend to win out but the easiest, or put another way it's most "efficient" ideas which win out. Modern science exists in a global intellectual supercontinent, of one language, one one model, and increasingly less than a half dozen dominating institutions in most fields. And just like the actual supercontinent Pangaea before it, this leads to less creative diversity, homogenised mega-fauna, and to put it bluntly a world dominated by dinosaurs, ripe for sudden extinctions.

Our old models aren't going to keep on working in the digital age.

the teacher instead called the police

Kidnapping added to the sordid history of child-molestations.

But, at least, it did not happen in a church.

You might recognize yourself in this article: http://www.theguardian.com/com...

More in fact: Wind power generates 140% of Denmark's electricity demand http://www.theguardian.com/env...

That's kind of misleading. The headline give you the impression this is a constant thing. Digging down into the article, says this happened on a "unusually windy day" at 3 AM. That 140% number is a outlier at a very specific time under very specific conditions and that may not happen again - or maybe it will. However, it is not the norm.I didn't see anywhere in the article what the average was or even a mean for days where windpower alone meets all need.

In the end, the article is a propaganda piece designed to pump up wind power as a solution.

Yes, only one!

http://grist.org/cities/miami-...

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

Wind power production has MORE than lived up to the hype. It's the single fastest growing power source by a WIDE margin precisely because it's been so phenomenally successful and the turbines trump is opposed to are some of the most productive in the world (coastal turbines in Scotland and the north sea are under wind damn near 100% of the time). Turbines are so cost effective up there (even with the cost of sinking foundation into deep water) because the wind never stops blowing and it blows with enough force that the turbines are almost always at maximum spin efficiency.

Coastal wind power is so effective that Denmark gets nearly 60% of their power from it and Scotland could EASILY be an exporter of power to the rest of the UK if they fully built out their wind resources.

More in fact:
Wind power generates 140% of Denmark's electricity demand
http://www.theguardian.com/env...