Slashdot Mirror

Some say the price tag of £27,000 is silly and that you'd need to be mad to spend so much on a tarted-up shopping trolley that still has the turning circle of Jupiter and the boot of a ballerina. But look at it another way. Look at it as a mid-engined 3 litre 255bhp road rocket. Look at it as a rival for the NSX and the 911 and then £27,000 suddenly becomes a bargain.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/driving/jeremy_clarkson/article883541.ece :-)

>>And outright racism still exists. In fact, thanks to phenomena as described above, it is in fact becoming more accepted, not less.

Go back and read what I said; I phrased it carefully. The battle over racism in the public arena has been won. You'll no longer see a mainstream senator like Byrd join the KKK, or a Strom Thurmond vote against various civil rights, or people blockading a school to stop black people from coming in. Socially, it was a complete revolution, with societal norms essentially being flipped on their head within a span of about 10 years, with MLK having a lot to do with it. Racism is condemned everywhere in popular culture these days. You mentioned the BNP, witness this response: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6824033.ece Even with the social pressure caused by the immigration of Muslims into the country, they still can't even count a percentage of voters in the country.

Which is why I said JK Rowling is 40 years too late with her message. If the massively powerful cultural norms we have today on race cannot end racism (and note I did not claim racism has ended), it's dubious that JKR's awkward condemnation of it will have any effect.

That also said, there are serious issues with Islam in the UK, mainly related to Sharia law and the culture conflict that stems from the large scale immigration of people from radically different backgrounds. Immigration isn't always good for the host country and can cause quite bad results - talk to a Christian Lebanese some time.

pregnant people

I am glad that you are so politically correct as not to exclude 50% of the population.

Well...

There is the pregnant man (transgendered technically).

I can't find it but there is also one case that a man (with the normal man equipment) that had a embryo implanted and was carried to term.

But curiously, the vast majority of terrorists are Muslims. Riddle me that, Batman...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6824884.ece

The root of the problem is not privacy, it is discrimination, human rights problems and how Japanese unwilling to deal with it. Here we go again: Google Earth maps out discrimination against burakumin caste in Japan.

This is 2005: UN Independent Investigator Raps Japan for Discrimination. Quote: "An independent investigator from the U.N. Commission on Human Rights says he will report that discrimination in Japan is "deep and profound....Mr. Doudou Diene told reporters in Tokyo he found no strong political will to combat racism and discrimination. He also noted what he called a strong xenophobic drive among the Japanese public. This xenophobic drive is expressed by associating minorities, certain minorities, to crime, to violence, to dirt," he said....Mr. Diene said the worst discrimination appears to be the problems a Japanese social outcast group, KNOWN AS "BURAKUMIN" face with finding housing and employment. He called their condition "shocking and terrible," and said their plight would be included in his preliminary report.".

Another example: Racial Discrimination in Japan. Quote "Japan is not usually synonymous with racism in Western media, unlike Mississippi or Soweto, but its society is pretty racist nonetheless....Also, the Japanese landlords do not normally hang out a "For Rent" sign at an apartment building. They go to a "fudosan"- a real estate agency to help them find tenants. However, try and check out some signs near your local "fudosan"- you can usually see those that say: "NO ANIMALS, NO PROSTITUTES, NO FOREIGNERS." Lovely, isn't it?.";

and another: "JAPANESE ONLY" SIGNS IN MISAWA, JAPAN;

and another: U.N. Urges Japan to Stop Discrimination against Korean School Children and Education;

and another: Japanese Discrimination Against Women;

and another: Housing Discrimination in Japan;

and another: Foreigners in Japan say openness all talk. Quote "I went to almost 25 real estate agents trying to get them to show me apartments," she recalled. "Finally, one of them took me aside and said, 'Japanese don't like to rent to foreigners. Many Japanese actually hate foreigners....Without a doubt, Japan is the most discriminatory place I have ever lived in";

Wikipedia: Ethnic issues in Japan

Which makes me wonder, are non-Japanese allowed to buy Japanese products?

All together, the evidence for magnetic monopoles "is now overwhelming", says Steve Bramwell, a materials scientist at University College London and author on one of the Science papers and one of the arXiv papers. ...

Even without directly seeing one, Bramwell says that he is certain that the monopoles are there. "I don't think anybody could question it after this flurry of papers," he says.

This mentality is a good example of what Joel Spolsky calls fire and motion. You just keep moving, keep publishing, keep innovating, and your opponent is so busy trying to catch up or deal with your earlier work that you gain huge momentum. Sometimes unstoppable momentum. People just can't deal with the information overload.

When the crystals are chilled to near absolute zero, they seem to fill with tiny single points of north and south. The points are less than a nanometre apart, and cannot be measured directly. Nevertheless, Morris and other physicists believe they are there.

For 30 years, physicists have believed that the universe is made up of tiny vibrating dimensional strings which only they are clever enough to understand. A fine idea, except it turns out not even they are clever enough after all. Nevertheless, they persist in this belief because the mathematics is beautiful. Likewise, many physicists persist in their belief in magnetic monopoles because the concept is beautiful, or some other such rubbish. Look! It even makes Maxwell's equations symmetric. So what? What's so important about having symmetric equations. Unsymmetrical ones are so much more interesting!

There's only one arbiter in physics, and science in general. It isn't a "flurry of papers". It isn't "beauty" or "symmetry" or "elegance" or "coolness". It isn't how many people agree with your viewpoint. It isn't how many journalists you can get to print words like "overwhealming evidence" in headlines. It isn't how much "supporting (online) material" you can find to back you.

The one, only, and final arbiter is the experiment. An honest to gods experiment. It finds things. It separates truth from fiction. You can try to twist the meaning of the result this way and that, throw back the grenade and carry on with your fire and motion, but in the end the results of all those experiments will finally weigh down your dishonesty and halt your advance.

There are no magnetic monopoles. You can try to separate north and south pole. You can even construct models of "magnetic charge" and dipoles if you like. But in the end, you can't get a north pole without having a corresponding south pole, very, very close by.

Modern science, and worst of all physics, is in a deplorable state. Cargo cult scientists,frauds, charlatans, fakes, and deluded true believers(Yes I'm serious about that last link) have saturated certainly the media circuit, but I fear many physics departments as well. Sensationalism and media attention are now as never before, deciding what the "consensus"* in science should be. It's disheartening to see the world lose its faith in the method of observation, hypothesis, experiment and above all skepticism that has served it so well for so many centuries.

P.S.
*Before the cranks jump in; No, I do not in fact, doubt the reality of anthropogenic climate change.

How would you define a cover-up? Would it be something along the lines of paying off a family never to mention their iPod Touch exploded?

Let's snip out the important bits of that article, which document events you seem to be unaware of:

Apple sent a letter to Mr Stanborough denying liability but offering a refund.

The letter also stated that, in accepting the money, Mr Stanborough was to "agree that you will keep the terms and existence of this settlement agreement completely confidential", and that any breach of confidentiality "may result in Apple seeking injunctive relief, damages and legal costs against the defaulting persons or parties".

Last week it emerged that Apple had tried to keep a number of cases where its iPod digital music players had started to smoke, burst into flames and even burned their owners, out of the public eye.

An American reporter obtained 800 pages of documentation on the cases from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) following a Freedom of Information Act request in that country. However, she was unable to get hold of the documents for months after "Apple's lawyers filed exemption after exemption".

Can you still claim they're not covering anything up?

From News Corp's own reporting of this in The Times:

"
"Mr Murdoch, who is also the chief executive of BSkyB, 39.1 per cent owned by News Corp, made clear that he believed that broadcasters such as Sky should be freed from the long-standing requirement to produce impartial news.

He argued that âoethe mere selection of stories and their place in the running order is itself a process full of unacknowledged partialityâ. The impartiality rule was âoean impingement on the freedom of speechâ.
"

Full article here: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article6814178.ece

If you want a world where news are delivered without balancing or opposite points of view to your won, then Mr Murdoch is your man.

I am not saying it. He is saying it himself.

They're a hell of a lot more trustworthy and reliable than Pakistan is.

I'm not so sure at all... USSR/Russia and India go way back — during the Ghandi times, KGB's influence over Indian politicians was near-complete. The success of penetrating India was an example, that KGB studied and thought to repeat in other countries. Most of those politicians are still alive and still busy — there was no clean-up, unlike, say, in Germany, which exposed Stazi agents. Kinda...

For all we know, there are, very likely, still people in various Indian ministries (including, no doubt, the Defense), who either never got off Russian payroll, or can be blackmailed by the new Russian agents.

Pakistan's military (rather than the entire country) was, probably, a better ally throughout, even if they aren't without problems of their own...

Thing is, the 'Digital Britain' report says the BBC licence fee has to be shared with news rivals, for example ITN News.

Not sure what Murdoch's bleating about, his organisation should be in line for some of this money too.

http://www.newscorp.com/news/bunews_39.html
http://www.newscorp.com/news/bunews_40.html

http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/402737/The-News-of-the-World-was-the-subject-of-some-ferocious-attacks.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124713962333917725.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124710587096916143.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124725579809924597.html
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2528020/Met-Police-No-investigation-into-hacking.html
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2530062/No-truth-in-News-of-the-World-phone-tap-claim.html
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Article/200907215334404
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Article/200907215335802
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25762968-401,00.html
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25763994-23109,00.html
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,25759684-7582,00.html
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25757545-2703,00.html
http://www.skynews.com.au/showbiz/article.aspx?id=351326
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6670747.ece

just a few links about it from News Corp. owned sources.

/deafening right?
//oh and in the end, it seems like the guardian (a rival newspaper to News Corp. in the uk) got a bit carried away with reporting this because they didnt seem to have any of the evidence of the claims that they were making.

It is possible as we have managed a conviction in the UK for a thoughtless bitch http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/7792229.stm.

Though I feel 21 months is getting off lightly when the maximum sentence for causing death by dangerous driving is 10 years.

Oh, yeah? ...The News of the World was also alleged to have paid an out-of-court settlement after a legal case allegedly threatened to make public evidence of hacking. The News of the World is part of News International, which also publishes The Times.

The fact is that the BBC is known for its objectivity.
.
Perhaps one considers the BBC "objective" if one is left-of-center. However, a report commissioned by the BBC itself (reported here) found bias.

The tell-tale sign is how young most of the bodies are with absolutely no trauma or anatomic evidence of disease or decay. Most of the bodies appear to be in their early to late twenties. The likelihood that all of these people died in hospital (if not laboratory) conditions of natural causes like cardiac arrhythmias is ridiculously unlikely to say the least.

But, the real evidence comes from direct investigations into the company itself. 20/20 did an investigation into the company, Premier Exhibitions, Inc. and found the actual warehouse where the bodies are preserved. Needless to say, it is NOT where the company claimed it to be, and the interview with the company's founder at the end is priceless. Further investigations by the government pretty much confirmed everyone's suspicions.

I'm surprised that all of this is news to many people. In 2006, Chinese authorities were bragging to the international media about how successful their "death vans" have been. These death vans are ambulances turned mobile execution chambers expressly designed for the preservation of organs. So proud was the company's spokesman in one of the subsequent articles that he insisted any interested overseas buyers reading the article should contact him directly for sales.

-Grym

This is embarrassing. Look at the thing. It looks like a land speed record vehicle. It's turbine powered. They took it to the Bonneville Salt Flats, where reaching 200 MPH in a straight line is no big deal. And they went 140MPH. Most production sports cars can do that. Some dragsters now exceed 300MPH for a quarter mile. If you don't have to corner, going fast is easy.

The current land speed record for wheel-driven vehicles is 451 MPH. (The record for thrust-driven vehicles is over Mach 1, but those are really low-flying aircraft.) The record for electrics is 257 MPH. There was an unsuccessful British attempt to break 300 MPH with an electric car in 2005; the power train works but the vehicle was unstable in a crosswind. 357 MPH has been reached with a TGV train. (Maglevs do slightly better, with the record there being 361 MPH.)

So 140 MPH on the Bonneville Salt Flats just isn't very impressive.

On the other hand, fraud on the part of the deniers is just a google search away, eg. here

For some matters the Law Lords are the highest court in the land...

s/are/were/

The Law Lords ceased to exist with their final judgements on 30th July.
Their replacement, the UK Supreme Court will sit for the first time on 12th October.

See
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/jul/30/law-lords-supreme-court
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6806362.ece
etc.

They've done ol' L. Ron one better...

I have given you a fine argument as to why the free market is not, in fact, the best mechanism for distributing health care. It is because markets work by pricing some people out of them.

You keep talking about how unfair it is that some health care is denied. Tell me, will government deny health care ?

You must understand, even though you deny it, that taking care of people takes resources. It takes docters, it takes medicine, it takes (extremely expensive) research, it takes ... and so on and so on.

Taking care of essentially unlimited people takes unlimited resources. But of course you don't mind that since you're going to steal those resources, you *think* that it's not going to be your money, incorrectly of course, but the delusional are happy (if liberals did want to use their own money they would have done it on the private market of course).

So tell me, who are you going to deny health care ? The criticism of Obama's plan is right (well the non-alarmist part), he advocates a plan that denies treatments to the elderly, on multiple levels. Both research to prolong life, and actual existing treatments will get axed.

In addition to that he will deny health care to extremely young infants. You see, here's a comment about what his health adviser published in the lancet :

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama's key advisor for health care reform, writes about rationing health care for older Americans that "allocation (of medical care) by age is not invidious discrimination." (The Lancet, January 2009) He calls this form of rationing, which is fundamental to Obamacare goals "the complete lives system." You see, at 65 or older, you've had more life years than a 25-year-old. As such, the latter can be more deserving of cost-efficient health care than older folks.

I don't fully understand how this way of reasoning applies to young infants, but apparently it's got something to do with protecting the state's investment in a person. In a newborn, there's no investment to protect, so no health care. Btw : this is MY OWN assessment after reading the lancet article. Perhaps I'm wrong about the investment thing (he does want to deny health care to newborns though).

So now we have, your policy :
-> requires suspension of economics to keep operating in anything but the extremely short term
-> requires that we are not "slaves" to human evolution (meaning that we find a way to prevent human evolution from occuring. Heh. Good luck with that)
-> does *not* in fact, extend coverage to everyone, and does *not* provide each individual with whatever health care is best suited to his condition

Needless to say this policy will fail. But whether that's a certainty or not, answer me this question :

When this policy fails, and the state has to limit budgetary expenses, because it raised taxes to absurd levels (the nazi government started the holocaust when taxation level required for social programs reached 98%. Somehow I doubt that's a coincidence. And in the first year of the holocaust social expenditure actually dropped). What will you do ?

-> let the system collapse, meaning there's no more America, and no more health care. In the end this option will result in even more corpses than the next option
-> deny health care to people, needless to say this will result in massive riots, and lots of death
-> invade pakistan (Obama suggested this, so I include it here)

Needless to say your remarks on other countries' health care systems are uninformed. You would find, for example, that health care in the Netherlands is private.

Sweden's health care system is indeed collapsing. Furthermore more than 50% of Sweden's population is dependent (directly) on state support. It doesn't take a genius to deduce what's going to happen next.

I must say I know little about Switzerland's health care system but I'm quite sure (I've got family with a very, very sick kid living there) there is no national health care system.

Theodore Dalrymple's opinion on the matter is that the police in England just don't bother to solve most crimes -- hardly even to investigate them. That their cameras do such a horrible job of helping criminal investigations shouldn't be a surprise, then; technology is only useful if it's used.

On the other hand, it's merciful that this kind of technology is not used. Privacy is an important thing, and it's not at all true that the only people who have cause to desire it are those who have something to hide; and as to controlling crime, it's foot patrols that work, not surveillance.

Here's awesome. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article6799283.ece Giant rat-eating nepenthes plant named after David Attenborough

Nepenthes attenboroughii. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article6799283.ece

You make it a joke but...

Um, why don't they just use the hydrogen as fuel? (of course, they might need to make modifications to current aircraft or even make new aircraft - but this is the military, they have money to burn) Then they could use solar & wind power to make it and we could use their technology for civilian purposes and everyone would love one another and we'd live in a utopian dreamworld. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article5907888.ece

Now take someone living in Japan and you'll see that they don't have our obesity and health problems. Probably because they don't use cars as much as we do and use their nice public transportation and walk a lot and their diet consists of generally healthy things like fish.

That and they tend to kill themselves before they can become part of the statistic.

Himmler is close, but both I and Mandelson himself think that Stalin's henchman Lavrentiy Beria is a closer fit:

"You're a kind of Trotsky figure," said a fellow guest.

"Oh no," said Lord Mandelson. "I'm far more of a Beria."

Beria is the nasty version of Himmler, as you will find if you read about his activities as Stalin's secret police chief. What sort of man would find a comparison with mass murderers like Trotsky and Beria flattering and amusing? A former member of the Young Communist League, perhaps? But I'm sure he abandoned the Marxist ideology years ago, just like the rest of New Labour. You know, when they became "right wing" like the BBC says. <Hollow Laughter>.

Despite what Darth Mandelson says, it is a little odd that these plans have come out just after he attended a dinner with David Geffen, who is a massive critic of file sharing: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6797844.ece

Or maybe this?

This is the UK where kids are becoming parents at 13. They're in the maternity ward before they get sex-education. And those are the good kids, the other ones are knifing each other.

News alert... The wealthy in the US already pay a lot of income taxes as the system is highly progressive. [snip] 39% of the ...total personal income taxes came from top 1%

While you are likely technically correct, there's a nuance that needs to stated: Warren Buffett noted that there are significant inequities in this so-called "progressive" tax system:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/tax/article1996735.ece

For those who do not RTFA, Warren notes that it's essentially ridiculous that he pays more as a percentage of his wealth than his secretary (who makes about $60K/year) and who has substantially less disposable income. Roughly summarized, Warren has essentially noted "tax the rich--it's OK, we'll figure out a way to make more."

According to a report by the "Times Online" and another report by "guardian.co.uk", today is the 1-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Georgia. Russian troops has not exited the territory of Georgia though Vladimir Putin signed an agreement to do so. Further, the Kremlin has recognized the occupied territory -- Abkhazia and South Ossetia -- as independent nations although the entire family of Western nations has not.

The coordinated Internet attack against a computer account owned by a Georgian is likely not a coincidence as the attack occurred precisely on the day marking the 1-year anniversary of this show of Russian military force. For that same reason, that a pair of Russian submarines loaded with nuclear missiles were recently patrolling off the East Coast of the United States is not a coincidence.

You forgot to add that Kosovo is not recognized by the Russian Federation nor the entire "family of Western Nations" (see Spain), but that did not stop the "family" from recognizing the breakaway areas of Georgia as occupied Georgian territory. Do you see the hypocrisy? The "family of nations" may decide what is independent or occupied territory with a complete disregard for context of the situation.

The small comment of the devious Russian submarines was a nice touch trying to demonize Russia and diverting the argument, but you should also add the fact that American and Israeli advisors were directing and working with Georgian forces before and during the attack as well as supplying the country with armaments. The Russian's have every right to stay to prevent foreign aggression.

Let's also forget that the U.S has a few hundred bases around the world (including U.S naval fleets), has worked on building a missile system in Poland, attacked and invaded countless countries, subverted democratic movements by coup/covert operations and promoted "free market" Capitalism through its proxies (the IMF and World Bank) all in the name of democracy and freedom.

Yes those dirty commies are up to no good and America is the beacon of light. May the Flying Spaghetti Monster bless America.

The coordinated Internet attack against a computer account owned by a Georgian is likely not a coincidence as the attack occurred precisely on the day marking the 1-year anniversary of this show of Russian military force. For that same reason, that a pair of Russian submarines loaded with nuclear missiles were recently patrolling off the East Coast of the United States is not a coincidence.

Oh dear, with twitter down i need to amuse myself through acts of googlecise;
Interviews with Ray Tomlinson

Interview 1: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3525110.ece

Interview 2: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/06/technology/looking-back-in-the-beginning-a-note-to-himself.html

Interview 3: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/article.php/1408411

My iPod explodes/catches fire. Apple's sensors indicate a severe temperature spike and a sharp jolt.

So here's the question, what exactly does this indicate? Cars have even more sophisticated black boxes and even then they rarely are able to piece together what actually happened using just that data. Does anyone actually think that these sensors are going to be used in any other way than blanket warranty denials?

Perhaps Murdoch is simply quitting a game that heâ(TM)s losing. The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Daily Mail have consistently dominated the UK ABCes [website traffic]. Why not play a different game altogether?

In the long run The Times website is a likely winner. The Telegraph is loaded down with debt, and The Guardian is losing too much money for even the Scott Trust to support for long.

Compare that with The Times. The Telegraph is using a print newspaper column layout, which I find unsuited to a browser window with a scrollbar. With the Times I can read down a single column, opening new tabs for stories I find interesting, and then scan up the sidebar as I scroll back to the top. With the Telegraph, and most other newspaper sites I've seen, I have to do a lot more work to track which sections I've scanned for interesting stories.

The column approach works for print because I can fit the whole page in my field of view and there are only a few stories per page anyway. For web it's too cluttered.

Patrick Moore is somehow still on the go, presenting The Sky At Night along with Chris Lintott. There are usually a good few astronomers and astrophysicists on as guests.

Richard Dawkins made an appearance, albeit brief, on Inside Nature's Giants.

Brian Cox has already been mentioned... I can't think of any more.

It really annoys me that the vast majority of documentaries these days are people-oriented, at the expense of science documentaries. I'm not saying that women are ruining the BBC, but I'm certainly thinking it loudly...

Don't you dare - if the AC wanted a good mod he could have posted a link to the REAL story in The Times. Instead, he sank to insulting people by telling them they're stupid "pseudo-intellectuals" that want to "feel better about themselves" while their country "is turning to shit". I, and quite a few of my friends (more than 10%) have read Orwell's 1984, a book that happens to be #8 on The Big Read's 100 best-loved books of Britain. And referencing it is appropriate - what isn't appropriate is believing one news outlet that you know nothing about. But that's very common these days.

The "UK Government" didn't confiscate anything. It's not clear that any confiscation actually happened. It's not some dimwitted action of central government. If you read the letter in the linked Times article:

'They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.'.

BEFORE. The only mention of confiscation is: "we would like her to return any confiscated CDs".

It was one trading standards officer. There are thousands of them all around the country. It was an honest misapplication of a policy which stops pirated software/DVDs/music being sold at town markets and small stores around the country, and it was confusion that was corrected. No lid was flipped, she just got a bit over-official. The officer in question was just doing her job and experiencing some confusion when encountering a new (to her) business model. The problem was resolved.

In http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6732520.ece there is link to the pdf report.

Qoute:

        "This review does not address contaminant content (such as herbicide, pesticide and fungicide residues) of organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs or the environmental impacts of organic and conventional agricultural practices."

Most people chose organic food because they are afraid that the herbicide, pesticide, rBST, estrogen etc. will poison them. It is not that they expect more calories, vitamins, fiber etc.

So while the original paper is ok per say, because it had the proper disclosure about the scope of the study, those who reported it were not truthful or were highly incompetent (did not read the paper).

If you read the original paper had you arrived to your above conclusion? Note that I do not claim that organic is healthier or not, just that this study does not even attempt to answer that question.

This story was picked up by BBC, CNN etc. On message boards flame wars occured, since noone got the right information. I had to spend time to hunt down the original study, because most "news" sites had no link to the pdf. I am losing complete faith in large commercial news outlets: they are wasting my time. Next time I will just assume that they did not do their homework and will not trust their conclusions. It would have been nice if the Slashdot editor would post the link to the pdf.

People who are completely broke still get laid.

Yeah, but that's not the whole story. Wealthy men give women more orgasms.

I never knew the Chinese thought so very little of themselves.

I thought the Olympics proved that to everyone. >1 billion people and they can't find a pretty girl that can sing? Or gymnasts that are over 14?

Yep - my surname has 5 letters in it, but in my signature you'll see 6 distinct squiggles.

In some ways you don't WANT your signature to be legible - legibility makes it easier to forge.

On the other hand, you want the rest of your cheque to be very legible, to guard against stuff like this - a lawyer set up a bank account in the name Ian Revue, so that he could cash his client's badly-scrawled cheques made out to the Inland Revenue.

How the hell is this a troll?

Who's modding this crap?

I read this in Time magazine just last week (granted, it was the bathroom copy, so quite a bit delayed, but still).

It's a valid point with references. WTF?

I'm burning some karma just to be sure it stays visible.

cliffski wrote:
actually a lot of stuff you assume goes to landfill gets stuck on a ship and exported to some third world country where it becomes 'someone else's problem'.
the west are great and dumping our crap on poorer countries. We brits got caught doing it with 1,400 tonnes of toxic waste a few days ago:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6719508.ece

Of course we are all better off just not knowing about this ro giving a fuck about how our actions affect other countries, so I'm sure its evil of greenpeace to even draw attention to it.
bastards eh?

actually a lot of stuff you assume goes to landfill gets stuck on a ship and exported to some third world country where it becomes 'someone else's problem'.
the west are great and dumping our crap on poorer countries. We brits got caught doing it with 1,400 tonnes of toxic waste a few days ago:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6719508.ece

Of course we are all better off just not knowing about this ro giving a fuck about how our actions affect other countries, so I'm sure its evil of greenpeace to even draw attention to it.
bastards eh?

Now, I do not know about missiles, but wind turbines are a NATO concern: see for instance times online
Note that there are a number of mechanisms by which a wind turbine can interfere with primary radar. It is not only the fact that the energy reflected back on the wind turbine can trick the radar into thinking that he is seeing a genuine target. Wind turbines can by the way also impact secondary radar. See for instance Eurocontrol for more information.

Why not? Believe it or not people are able to sue when they are harmed by somebody, even in China.

You realize that families who lost their children as a direct result of incompetence and negligence haven't even been able to seek redress under the Chinese system? You really think some poor bastard working for an industrial conglomerate stands a chance? I think you've wandered away from the reservation on this one....

Parents devastated at the loss of sons and daughters, most born under China's strict "one couple, one child" family planning policy, have sought a government accounting and a proper explanation as to why so many schools fell down.

Police and local officials have blocked parents of the dead children from staging protests to seek information. An Amnesty International report this week chronicles instances in which parents were detained by police while seeking answers from courts.

Lawyers who took on such cases came under pressure to drop their involvement.

Nuclear power plants in the 1500 Megawatt range cost 30-40 Billion dollars just to build.

Nonsense. The new French reactor, 1650 MWe, has a pricetag of $4.8 billion. Recent Japanese and Korean reactors were in the same range - $2-3/W (PPP), as surveyed by MIT CEEPR (under "update on the cost of nuclear power"). The accompanying study (2009) predicts costs for new US reactors to be $4/W. In short, the numbers are consistent. You can look up cost figures, levelized cost studies (here's a start) up and down, and you will find this is true.

Wind Farms in the 1500 Megawatt range cost 300-400 million dollars to build.

Also nonsense. Just take one recent UK wind farm, which came in at £111 M for 60 MWe - $2.07/W, or extrapolating, over $3 billion for 1500 MW. You can survey costs all over the web, and this is typical. Whitelee, Europe's largest onshore farm, cost £300M ($496M) for 322 MWe, $1.54/W. Lynn and Inner Dowsing - UK's largest offshore farm - came in at £300 M ($496 M) for 194 MWe, $2.56/MW. The famous London Array is now at £3B ($4.96 billion) for 1,000 MWe: $4.96/W. (To be fair though, this represents a 200% cost overrun over the original estimates.) (Sorry about the angstrom signs: they are supposed to be British "pound" symbols)

Also, besides the fact that your bogus figures for wind are 10 times cheaper than reality (and for nuclear, 10 times more expensive than reality), your comparison is bogus in yet another away. You comparable incomparable quantities: a megawatt of baseload yields far more energy than a megawatt of wind power - because it yields power continuously, whereas the wind turbines are very frequently down, or generating at fractional capacity. This is represented by the "capacity factor", which is the fraction of the nameplate capacity actually achieved by a power plant - ratio of [average power output]/[power capacity]. And while nuclear power plants, as generally reliable baseload plants, run at 90%+ capacity factor - that is, average 0.90 MWe of generation for each 1 MWe of nameplate capacity - wind farms, becuase of the obvious intermittency of wind, average only 20-30% capacity factors, with some exceptional offshore locations yielding 40%. Those megawatts are completely incomparable: 1 MWe of nuclear yields 2-4 times more energy than 1 MWe of wind power.

Your source thinks evolution is science and gives interviews to Rush Limbaugh. He also participated in a movie that:

• Misrepresents the views of interviewed scientists.
• Claims that anthropogenic global warming is a giant conspiracy to oppress Africa.
• Relies heavily on the well-debunked theory that solar activity can account for present-day warming and blatantly misrepresents data to support that view.
• Mislabels the axis of a graph, presenting data up to the early 80s as data up to 2000, because showing the actual data going that far would contradict its claims.
• Says that volcanoes produce more CO2 than man.
• Parrots the oft-repeated claim that scientists are just in it for the money. All of them, every single one. It's a giant conspiracy and nobody involved has come out and said anything.
• Is made by an immature, childish asshole.

And is in general laden with half-truths and outright lies.

Forgive me if I'm a tad bit skeptical.