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Ahh, 1987...

I was wondering how long it would be before someone brought up Mathias Rust. I wonder which one of them will get the harshest sentence for their stunt.

Ahh, 1987...

Since the invention of coinage there has never ever, not even once, been a currency based on trust.

This is absolutely not the case.

As little as 200 years ago, there were many competing currencies, typically backed in gold. There was even merchant's associations and regular publications on how much you should discount certain bank's currency because the redeeming bank was far away, or not as trustworthy. Wikipedia has a whole catalog of these notes.

These are all bills/scrips backed by banks/companies, further backed by gold... how do you figure they were based on trust? Seems to me that a currency based on gold is not based on trust.

Since the invention of coinage there has never ever, not even once, been a currency based on trust.

This is absolutely not the case.

As little as 200 years ago, there were many competing currencies, typically backed in gold. There was even merchant's associations and regular publications on how much you should discount certain bank's currency because the redeeming bank was far away, or not as trustworthy. Wikipedia has a whole catalog of these notes.

"Ocean acidification killed off more than 90 per cent of marine life 252 million years ago, scientists believe"
Nonsense published in The Independent in April 2015.

In an attempt to frighten people about rising CO2 and ocean acidification The Independent ran a story postulating ocean acidification could have been responsible for massive die-offs we know as major extinction events. This is unlikely. Translate "scientists believe" as "a couple of guys had a crazy idea and wrote it up.". In a climate of increasing CO2 this might resonate with some, but rising CO2 has now stalled.

Global energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide stalled in 2014
Preliminary IEA data point to emissions decoupling from economic growth for the first time in 40 years
http://www.iea.org/newsroomand...

If it was so acid why didn't the coral die out? It's by far the most sensitive to pH. The fact is, coral has survived 7000 ppm CO2 in the past much higher than the 400ppm of today.

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

How? It has genes it can switch on that let it ignore heat and pH, that's why. Have they not surveyed all the literature?

Mechanisms of reef coral resistance to future climate change
In less than 2 years, acclimatization achieves the same heat tolerance that we would expect from strong natural selection over many generations for these long-lived organisms.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

Palau's coral reefs surprisingly resistant to ocean acidification
January 16, 2014 - Marine scientists working on the coral reefs of Palau have made two unexpected discoveries that could provide insight into corals' resistance and resilience to ocean acidification.
http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ....

JJ Scheel (1968:Page 25) proved in the 1950s aquatic life doesn't care about pH at all which you can prove to yourself at home. Transfer any fish from water of pH 9 to water of pH 4.5 and back again - they simply don't care about pH. One of the great aquarium myths along with "nitrates are deadly" (Not with an LD of 2200 ppm for marine larvae they're not) and "Plant bulbs" are essential (no, intensity matters, spectrum not one bit).

It's a widely held myth they do but again, the literature suggests otherwise and I've verified it's right on countless occasions and you can too.

Mythbusters rates this one: utter nonsense. Supervolcanoes blocked out the sun. When you have no light, warmths or plant life, pH of the water, irrelevant to aquatic life, is the least of your problems. Every species alive today survived this, there's no reason to think they won't if it were to happen again - which is isn't.

Refs:
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ....
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
https://books.google.ca/books?...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

"Ocean acidification killed off more than 90 per cent of marine life 252 million years ago, scientists believe"
Nonsense published in The Independent in April 2015.

In an attempt to frighten people about rising CO2 and ocean acidification The Independent ran a story postulating ocean acidification could have been responsible for massive die-offs we know as major extinction events. This is unlikely. Translate "scientists believe" as "a couple of guys had a crazy idea and wrote it up.". In a climate of increasing CO2 this might resonate with some, but rising CO2 has now stalled.

Global energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide stalled in 2014
Preliminary IEA data point to emissions decoupling from economic growth for the first time in 40 years
http://www.iea.org/newsroomand...

If it was so acid why didn't the coral die out? It's by far the most sensitive to pH. The fact is, coral has survived 7000 ppm CO2 in the past much higher than the 400ppm of today.

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

How? It has genes it can switch on that let it ignore heat and pH, that's why. Have they not surveyed all the literature?

Mechanisms of reef coral resistance to future climate change
In less than 2 years, acclimatization achieves the same heat tolerance that we would expect from strong natural selection over many generations for these long-lived organisms.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

Palau's coral reefs surprisingly resistant to ocean acidification
January 16, 2014 - Marine scientists working on the coral reefs of Palau have made two unexpected discoveries that could provide insight into corals' resistance and resilience to ocean acidification.
http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ....

JJ Scheel (1968:Page 25) proved in the 1950s aquatic life doesn't care about pH at all which you can prove to yourself at home. Transfer any fish from water of pH 9 to water of pH 4.5 and back again - they simply don't care about pH. One of the great aquarium myths along with "nitrates are deadly" (Not with an LD of 2200 ppm for marine larvae they're not) and "Plant bulbs" are essential (no, intensity matters, spectrum not one bit).

It's a widely held myth they do but again, the literature suggests otherwise and I've verified it's right on countless occasions and you can too.

Mythbusters rates this one: utter nonsense. Supervolcanoes blocked out the sun. When you have no light, warmths or plant life, pH of the water, irrelevant to aquatic life, is the least of your problems. Every species alive today survived this, there's no reason to think they won't if it were to happen again - which is isn't.

Refs:
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ....
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
https://books.google.ca/books?...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Scared?

It's not a challenge to see who can out-macho the most. There's nothing to be scared of at all. However, I'd rather not share a world with little more than rats and cockroaches (hyperbole, but you get the point).

Big extinctions is why we don't have cool things like this any more http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

The Heartbleed logo is the first logo designed in almost 50 years that has no need for a drop shadow.

Are drop shadows really that popular in logos? The trend as I see it seems to be towards "flat" designs, both in logos and other areas like UIs (e.g. recent versions of iOS and OSX have dropped the pseudo-3d elements and specular highlights). When I think of a typical modern corporate logo I think of something like the new (2001) BP logo, which is entirely flat.

Jurassic park would have maybe not been as scary had their "raptors" looked like this. ;)

Regardless, velociraptors still hate goto statements ...

What are you talking about? Every self-respecting nerd should know that they're still here.

People need to stop picturing all dinosaurs as looking like some kind of leathery reptiles. I mean, we not only know now that velociraptor was feathered, but even how many secondary wing feathers it had (14). Jurassic park would have maybe not been as scary had their "raptors" looked like this. ;)

Meanwhile, some of their descendants today look like this and attack like this.

This is such an ignorant post I can't believe it. It appears you've never actually had an airplane's controls in your hands.
1) Fly-by-wire isn't what you think it is. It simply means there are no mechanical linkages.
2) Airbus' computer-over-human approach is no panacea and it has resulted in numerous near-disasters, one of the most recent ones.
3) Even Airbus isn't religious about this approach. Read up on Alternate Law and Direct Law.
4) Had Sully not maneuvered USAirways 1549, it'd have landed in the middle of housing.
5) Water landings require you to do a flare & float to stall just feet above the water level to minimize airspeed. If he had not done this, the airplane could have easily smashed itself apart, since an A320 power-off glide rate of descent is around 1500 fpm. Water isn't soft at these kinds of speeds you know.

Same for "the first time the start menu, task bar, minimize, maximize and close buttons are introduced on each window" (style errors aside: "start menu"/"task bar" on every window?), again min/max/close buttons were present on every window in early Lisa/MacOS, AmigaOS, Atari TOS, even Geos for C=64 way before MS copied it from Apple (who copied it from Xerox). The only thing Microsoft keeps (re)inventing is history. I guess stock prices aren't inflated high enough yet.

Not only this, but also Windows 2.0 and Windows 3.0 had minimize and maximize buttons. The only addition to window titlebars in Win95 was the close button (which was previously achieved by double-clicking on the menu button at the left of the window titlebar). Some quality research has obviously gone into this article.

Obligatory link to The Microsoft Hall Of Innovation. Looks like the site hasn't been maintained in quite a while and has been gone since 2010 or so, gotta love the wayback machine. I'd love to see an updated version.

Same for "the first time the start menu, task bar, minimize, maximize and close buttons are introduced on each window" (style errors aside: "start menu"/"task bar" on every window?), again min/max/close buttons were present on every window in early Lisa/MacOS, AmigaOS, Atari TOS, even Geos for C=64 way before MS copied it from Apple (who copied it from Xerox). The only thing Microsoft keeps (re)inventing is history. I guess stock prices aren't inflated high enough yet.

Not only this, but also Windows 2.0 and Windows 3.0 had minimize and maximize buttons. The only addition to window titlebars in Win95 was the close button (which was previously achieved by double-clicking on the menu button at the left of the window titlebar). Some quality research has obviously gone into this article.

Obligatory link to The Microsoft Hall Of Innovation. Looks like the site hasn't been maintained in quite a while and has been gone since 2010 or so, gotta love the wayback machine. I'd love to see an updated version.

Reminder: This is fashion too.

And you are thinking the Apple Watch cannot meet the standard of "fashion"?

A bonus reminder: This watch costs $230,000. It is named "Space Pirate"

You still think the Apple Watch is too expensive? Considering the utility it doesn't seem like much at all in comparison to the watches most people wear.

ZZ Top had the right idea all those years ago https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Where in the cockpit? This photo looks like it's taken from (or near) the jump seat - the bulkhead is literally behind you. Modern cockpits on short haul aircraft do not have spare space in them.

Instead of taking the word of a fanboy being ridiculous because someone suggested nuclear is not perfect in some way that nobody gives a shit about I suggest taking a look for yourself:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
That's from the article about the station he's writing about which is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Note the line "20 billion US gallons (76,000,000 m) of treated water are evaporated each year.

So yes, the Jordan plant is going to need a LOT of water but nobody said it has to be drinkable or even fresh water. It just means it has to be sited near the sea, a river or a lake (even a very salty lake) or have some other access to a lot of water.
It's not a disadvantage, just a constraint, and it's pathetic that somebody is enough of clueless fanboy to see it as an attack instead of just a statement about a choice of site.

It's really more of a three body system composed of the Sun, Jupiter, and Saturn. The rest of the planets are too small (the inner planets) or too distant (Neptune, Uranus) to influence the barycenter of the solar system.

Just install a mains-powered fan between the two computers.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

That post is about enhancing their wiki code templating language, not switching away from PHP. The only thing they're switching is to HHVM, which is still PHP code.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2014...

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013... (not that I beleive in Lua)

Nice troll. But inaccurate on both counts:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...

I could be in any part of the green area. Try again.

Another useful visual, if a bit more "dry", courtesy Wikipedia...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

That's not the way it happened. The deal was made after the trouble started and is ongoing.. ISIS an asset, and the big plus is that they take on all the bad press. If you really believe it wasn't intentional, then you too, can be the next owner of this fine piece of architecture. Get a grip and look at the numbers yourself. You are wagging the dog.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

exists for a reason.

Just need some lasers to mount on its head...

States don't all get the same number of electoral votes. California currently has 55 electoral votes.
Here is the electoral map by county for the most recent presidential elections: http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
Etc.
Yet all of California's votes went for the Democrat. People living in eastern California haven't voted for the Democrat since 1968. Do they feel represented or do they feel like the bastard stepchild of L.A. and San Francisco?

States don't all get the same number of electoral votes. California currently has 55 electoral votes.
Here is the electoral map by county for the most recent presidential elections: http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
Etc.
Yet all of California's votes went for the Democrat. People living in eastern California haven't voted for the Democrat since 1968. Do they feel represented or do they feel like the bastard stepchild of L.A. and San Francisco?

A bowling water reactor is 3 things. There is the reactor pressure vessel that looks like this. That sits inside a primary containment vessel. That then sits inside of a concrete bunker. The fuel probably burned through the pressure vessel but is inside the containment vessel.

A bowling water reactor is 3 things. There is the reactor pressure vessel that looks like this. That sits inside a primary containment vessel. That then sits inside of a concrete bunker. The fuel probably burned through the pressure vessel but is inside the containment vessel.

will not confirm nor deny as per praxis.

What does an explodey Klingon moon have to do with this?

Didn't you know that the UK establishment is run by Klingons? Though they have let a Ferengi and a Vulcan enter the government too.

I'm a bit of a mechanical keyboard nerd, I collect keyboards with all sorts of form factors and switches. I know it can be quite challenging to find your first mech, and to make sense of all the terminology, so I thought I'd write down a short guide to help you through your selection process.

First of all, you need to decide on a form factor. Generally speaking mechanical keyboards come in 3 form factors: full size, tenkeyless (or 87%) and 60%.

Full size keyboards of course have all 104 keys as defined in the ANSI keyboard standard. You should always look for a standard key layout without a weird shaped enter key or other weirdly placed or shaped keys.

Tenkeyless keyboards are like full size keyboards but with the numpad removed. This makes them more compact, meaning they take up less deskspace and more importantly, you can place your mouse in a more ergonomical position closer to the alphanumerical section of your keyboard where your hands will be most of the time, so when you grab the mouse, you have to reach out less far. This is by far my favorite form factor, and unless you do a lot of data entry and really need your numpad, I can heartily recommend this form factor. Most mechanical keyboards that are available in full size, also have a tenkeyless variant by the way.

As the name implies, 60% keyboards are ultra compact. They lack navigation and function keys that are found on a full size keyboard, but the functionality of those keys can be accessed via a second layer and an Fn modifier key. Some examples of 60% keyboards are the Happy Hacking Keyboard, the Poker II and the Ducky Mini. Given the fact that you are coming from a full size keyboard, I am hesitant to steer you towards a 60% keyboard.

Now once you have decided on a form factor, it's time to think about what kind of keyboard switch you like to type on. There are 3 major types of switches: the most common by far are Cherry MX switches. Less common and more expensive are Topre switches. Finally you have the classic buckling spring switch, as found on the Model M.

I'll start with the buckling spring. They are the grand daddy of mechanical switches. They were originally found in the iconic IBM Model M keyboard of the late 80s and early 90s. IBM has stopped making them long ago, but a company called Unicomp has acquired the patents and tooling, and they now produce Unicomp branded Model M's that are virtually replicas of the original IBM keyboard. This type of keyboard really is a typist's dream. Pressing the keys gives very solid tactile feedback and a loud (and I mean LOUD) thunky click. It sounds like a machine gun if you are typing on it at speed. If you share an office with other people, I would not recommend them. They are also not very good for gaming. This doesn't mean that you can't game with them, I have and a lot of people do, but other switch types just work better for that purpose.

Cherry MX switches are by far the most common. They come in many variants: linear, tactile, clicky, stiff, soft, ... The color of the switch indicates the type. For a first timer, I would recommend that you only look at MX Blue and MX Brown switches.

• MX Blue switches are clicky and give tactile feedback, a bit like buckling springs, but lighter and less loud. The same advantages and disadvantages apply: good for typing, bad for gaming, noisy.
• MX Brown switches are a good jack of all trades switch: they don't click, but they do give some tactile feedback in the form of a slight bump that you feel when you press down a key. I've never found noise to be an issue with them, they're effective to type on even if it's a bit less satisfactory than a clicky switch, and gaming works well too.
• MX Red is another common switch you find. They are a so called linear switch, which means that they are not tactile and n

This is the result of getting jerked around by politicians every few years. America got to the moon because it was something everyone could agree upon that would stick it to the Ruskies!

After doing the bulk r&d for the Apollo project, the budget sort of tapered off ... https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

It's like every President since Kennedy felt they needed to give NASA some long term objective just to have the following Presidency give them something else, and have both House and Senate subcommittees give their two cents on objectives and funding.

It's just a recipe for the bullshit you see right now.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...

Parts of the Moon have natural concentrations of Thorium in the 10 ppm range. A little nuclear waste won't make a difference:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

So much for orders of magnitude.

You can't just dismiss numbers because you don't like them. Or, if you prefer, (in your best crocadile dundee accent) That's not a mine, this http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... is a mine.

Either way so what? That's one large uranium mine. There are more large coal mines, because Uranium has 4*10^6 higher energy density. Even if uranium was evenly distributed through the Earth's crust (at 2.6ppm), then you'd still need to mine 1/10 of the volume to get the equivalent energy of coal.

And it's not uniformly distributed, it's much more concentrated than that.

OK, so let's try again.

From wikipedia: The worldwide production of uranium in 2012 amounted to 58,394

For coal, it was 7,000,000,000 tonnes.

Even given low concentrations that's a lot of zeros to play with.

Seriously though you're arguing against the wildly insanely huge energy density of nuclear fuels, which is frankly silly.

Except that you don't mine pure uranium, you have to mine uranium ore (pitchblende) from what is mostly useless rock and then refine it while coal is basically ready to use and comes in seams. Coal dust is not good for your lungs, but uranium ore dust also gets you radioactive poisoning, and so does radon exposure, with the additional benefit of lung cancer. It is no coincidence that uranium mining used to be a prison-camp job.

This is how an uranium mine looks like. So much for orders of magnitude.

Gravitational Lensing already proves spacetime curvature.

Lensing Image

Emoji of Microsoft Minecraft 2

Xfce 4 has been a great desktop environment, but it's now clear that GTK+ is a dead end.

GTK+ is rife with serious problems. The first is that it's affiliated with the GNOME crew. Their grasp of sensible, proper UI design is very suspect, especially after the GNOME 3 disaster. For example, these are the kind of people who took gedit, GNOME's text editor, and changed it from this sensible, usable UI to this hideous, unusable UI. You can even see a screenshot of this shitty UI in the Xfce 4.12 tour! It has, sadly, been infected by this bad UI design.

The portability of GTK+ is, to put it politely, utter rubbish. X11 is the only platform where it isn't a disgrace. It "works" under Windows and OS X, but if by "working" you mean it runs but is generally unusable. I haven't been able to ever get it working properly under OS X. It didn't even get to the point where it showed a UI, the last time I tried it. Inkscape is horrible. GIMP is horrible. Every other GTK+ app I've tried on Windows or OS X has been absolutely horrible.

It will be a lot of work, but they need to port Xfce from GTK+ to Qt. Qt is a much better toolkit. It looks great. It works (and actually works, in that the resulting software is perfectly usable!) pretty much everywhere.

GTK+ had its place in the late 1990s. But we're well past that time now. Qt is the best toolkit to use these days. I truly wish that the Xfce devs would port from GTK+ to Qt, so that we users can use it on Windows and OS X, as well as getting a much better experience under Linux.

Xfce 5 has to be based on Qt.

Xfce 4 has been a great desktop environment, but it's now clear that GTK+ is a dead end.

GTK+ is rife with serious problems. The first is that it's affiliated with the GNOME crew. Their grasp of sensible, proper UI design is very suspect, especially after the GNOME 3 disaster. For example, these are the kind of people who took gedit, GNOME's text editor, and changed it from this sensible, usable UI to this hideous, unusable UI. You can even see a screenshot of this shitty UI in the Xfce 4.12 tour! It has, sadly, been infected by this bad UI design.

The portability of GTK+ is, to put it politely, utter rubbish. X11 is the only platform where it isn't a disgrace. It "works" under Windows and OS X, but if by "working" you mean it runs but is generally unusable. I haven't been able to ever get it working properly under OS X. It didn't even get to the point where it showed a UI, the last time I tried it. Inkscape is horrible. GIMP is horrible. Every other GTK+ app I've tried on Windows or OS X has been absolutely horrible.

It will be a lot of work, but they need to port Xfce from GTK+ to Qt. Qt is a much better toolkit. It looks great. It works (and actually works, in that the resulting software is perfectly usable!) pretty much everywhere.

GTK+ had its place in the late 1990s. But we're well past that time now. Qt is the best toolkit to use these days. I truly wish that the Xfce devs would port from GTK+ to Qt, so that we users can use it on Windows and OS X, as well as getting a much better experience under Linux.

Xfce 5 has to be based on Qt.

Titan is gorgeous.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
http://www.astrobio.net/wp-con...
True color: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

It's also the setting of the first chapter in the brilliant hard sci-fi novel Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem.
I can't wait for new probes to report from there.

Titan is gorgeous.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
http://www.astrobio.net/wp-con...
True color: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

It's also the setting of the first chapter in the brilliant hard sci-fi novel Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem.
I can't wait for new probes to report from there.

The GIMP doesn't really mean anything, because what's at play here is our mental perception of color. White snow in the shade has a distinct blue tone if you look at it in a photo editor, but that doesn't mean that it is blue. Really, we've got that exact phenomena going on here - the colors could be adequately described two different ways, white and gold dress in the shade (blue-ish light) or blue and black dress in incandescent light (gold-ish). It's really a matter of interpretation.

For another great example of just how confounding this effect can be: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

The thing that really hit me about the screenshot was how crowded it looks. The example is presenting information with a clear underlying structure (a file system) and a small number of actions I can take, and probably half the area of that window is empty space. And yet, my immediate reaction is that there's no clear structure to tell me where to look, and the design desperately needs more visual hierarchy and better use of whitespace. Of course, this is a recurring problem with the current trend for flat designs

I agree that the screenshot looks more complicated than it needs to, but I'm not sure it's a problem with the "flat" graphical style so much as the layout which (IMHO) looks like versions of Windows from the not-at-all-flat Vista onwards (and even XP to some extent until you turned some of the crap off).

The problems with the icons there are- if anything- that they've moved *away* from flat design which (done well) would- and should- have simplified them to their essential elements and made them recognisable at a distance (à la road signs, etc.).

But, as stated by others elsewhere, MS has always been about change for the sake of change, playing silly b*****s by introducing new technologies and ways of doing things that are discarded in the next version of Windows simply for the sake of being new, or at least for selling some "new" crap.

Windows 10. Nice and flat, just like twm circa 1990.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twm
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Twm

I'll throw some screenshots here so people can compare easily.

- Windows 3.1
- Windows 95
- Windows 7
- Windows 10 new icons from the article
- Windows 10 new Recycle Bin and Control Panel icons

I may be mistaken, but Congress passed the Patriot Act., not Bush or Obama. If blame is to be had, it should go to the people who voted for it, and the people who voted to keep and expand it.

This shows who has been in control since the Patriot Act was created - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

I understand gridlock, but there were a solid 4 years after the Patriot Act being passed where the R's controlled both houses and the White House. The Democrats had 2 years of owning the whole show. Neither group seemed to care about limiting government powers.

For even greater pleasure.