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You know, I remember the 60s and early 70s in the US, before the Clean Air Act was amended to empower the federal government to regulate emissions.

If you are under 50, you would not believe how bad things got. Look at pictures of Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago. Hell, even Salt Lake City was barely recognizable. It wasn't just big cities, either; small cities like Birmingham looked like this.

When you look at an old movie or TV show from the late 60s early 70s and everything in the distance looks hazy, that's not the film. That's what cities actually looked like on a good day.

I bring this up because the decision to to do something about air pollution was a sign of how healthy our democracy used to be. There was a problem that was costly and complex to tackle, but we did it. And as today there were people who profited by the status quo, that allowed them to externalize their waste management costs. The difference is that their hold on politicians was a lot less, and there was more independent media. Had we not done something about air pollution in 1970, we'd be where Beijing is now, and we'd be just as powerless to do anything about it today.

You know, I remember the 60s and early 70s in the US, before the Clean Air Act was amended to empower the federal government to regulate emissions.

If you are under 50, you would not believe how bad things got. Look at pictures of Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago. Hell, even Salt Lake City was barely recognizable. It wasn't just big cities, either; small cities like Birmingham looked like this.

When you look at an old movie or TV show from the late 60s early 70s and everything in the distance looks hazy, that's not the film. That's what cities actually looked like on a good day.

I bring this up because the decision to to do something about air pollution was a sign of how healthy our democracy used to be. There was a problem that was costly and complex to tackle, but we did it. And as today there were people who profited by the status quo, that allowed them to externalize their waste management costs. The difference is that their hold on politicians was a lot less, and there was more independent media. Had we not done something about air pollution in 1970, we'd be where Beijing is now, and we'd be just as powerless to do anything about it today.

You know, I remember the 60s and early 70s in the US, before the Clean Air Act was amended to empower the federal government to regulate emissions.

If you are under 50, you would not believe how bad things got. Look at pictures of Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago. Hell, even Salt Lake City was barely recognizable. It wasn't just big cities, either; small cities like Birmingham looked like this.

When you look at an old movie or TV show from the late 60s early 70s and everything in the distance looks hazy, that's not the film. That's what cities actually looked like on a good day.

I bring this up because the decision to to do something about air pollution was a sign of how healthy our democracy used to be. There was a problem that was costly and complex to tackle, but we did it. And as today there were people who profited by the status quo, that allowed them to externalize their waste management costs. The difference is that their hold on politicians was a lot less, and there was more independent media. Had we not done something about air pollution in 1970, we'd be where Beijing is now, and we'd be just as powerless to do anything about it today.

Nobody? People don't think that infringers are attacking ships, but they are trying to use the bad reputation of pirates as part of a propaganda campaign, since the numbers don't back them up. They also try to conflate infringement with theft, despite grossly different underlying economics.

Frost != snow and ice storms. Spend a winter in any midwestern city where they use salt on the roads. Seriously, it will suck, but it will break you of whining about California roads.

Geez, how ignorant can you be? https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Uhm, no. Skim "milk" is made by separation, "whole" milk undergoes filtering but no separation. Here's a simplified graph.

And around here (a 50k town, Poland), shops don't even carry skim water anymore, and often don't carry 2% demilked "milk" either. Even poor people don't buy that crap. On the other hand, I wonder why UHT milk imitation products still exist...

Er how is it a social disaster, at least here in the UK? The next one in the UK is in Corie Glas, here is a picture

https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

So apart from a few deer, which need a minigun taking to anyway exactly who is this going to inconvenience? The other actively considered scheme in the UK that I am aware of is to expand the existing facility at Ben Cruachan, by digging a new turbine hall out the inside of the mountain and a larger dam up the mountain. There was an option for another one at Balmacaan but that has been shelved as far as I know. There is potential for some 500GWh of pumped storage in Scotland alone, which is about enough to power the UK overnight entirely from pumped storage. There is of course extra capacity in Wales and England that could be built to make going overnight easy peasy. That's before we figure in some tidal power which of course generates in the middle of the night anyway.

Not so fast. AFAIK, jurisdiction over the Internet has been removed from the FTC, and it would take an act of Congress to put it back... and that sure as shit don't look likely. Any talk of the FTC, for now, is a head-fake excuse for gutting the FCC and letting Comcast and its ilk get drunk and party at your expense.

Face it, ladies. The Internet is the new telephone system - the FCC should regulate it as a common-carrier. Period. That makes it boring to the carriers, gutting a lot of "opportunities" to squeeze extra money out (like selling your browsing histories), but too fucking bad. The Internet ain't no luxury anymore - shit, your grandma needs it just to get her goddamn meds.

Besides, the FTC is not invulnerable to politics. Maybe they don't have a politically ambitious loud-mouth tool as Chairman who wants nothing more than to see himself on TV, but a GOP-controlled everything can muzzle the FTC, and they will, if the price is right.

They also built a freaking massive hangar, which is now a tropical theme park.

It's not just huge by building standards, it's huge even by hangar standards. By far the largest in the world.

The populations in Africa and the Middle East have far exceeded the available resources in those regions, and they're now heavily dependent on handouts from Western nations. There's no sign of the reproduction rates slowing down in those regions, either.

You must be a trump voter, because you're bringing up a lot of alternative facts. Developing nations are becoming less dependent on the west. And the birth rate is in fact slowing down in all areas.

The focus should be on getting the reproduction rates in third-world regions back down to more reasonable levels, to prevent the never-ending stream of famines, wars, and disease outbreaks we've been witnessing in such regions lately.

Another Trump voter sign: imagining things used to be better in your youth when in fact they were quantifiably worse, and making decisions which are going to exacerbate the perceived problems. Diseases are at an all-time low thanks to hygiene, sanitation, and vaccines. Much of that has been thanks to aid from western nations to developing nations. Oil dependence is going to cause wars, climate change is going to cause famine, and neither of those things are going to be solved by lowering birth rates. Which, as we have already covered, are in decline already.

Do your kids come out of the creek looking like this? (which I can believe). One thing that is true is that "newer" (read post-70s) front loaders use far less water for environmental reasons (its not just the amount of water going in, its the amount of energy required to move that water around, which is where the energy savings come from) and will take longer to wash, but should do a better job overall. If the clothes are saturated to that extent, you're likely going to want to put prewash mode on.

If you're more concerned with the time it takes (why are you waiting for it? have you got nothing to do in the meanwhile? is this the laundry equivalent of the "compiling" excuse?) then it likely isn't for you, but I can hate you for being so impatient.

The remarkable thing about this older software is just how much more usable and sensible the UIs were then compared to the awful "modern" UIs we have to deal with today.

Just look at the SimpleText editor that was commonly used on Macintoshes back in the day. Now compare it to a "modern" text editor UI, like that of GNOME 3's Gedit. It's like night and day! The "ancient" text editor has a clean, sensible, intuitive and usable UI. The "modern" text editor is a dirty, jumbled, messy and impractical UI.

It's not just text editors that are affected, of course. Web browsers today have UIs that are worse than the early Mosaic and Netscape Navigator UIs. The entire desktop environment is much worse today. GNOME 3 is awful in comparison even to the early Mac desktop environment.

We've had 20 to 30 years to improve on the early desktop concepts that the Mac introduced to the public at large. And we actually were making really good progress, up until about 2007 or 2008. Then it all went to hell. Some people will blame it on mobile devices, and some people will blame it on Millennials/hipsters. Realistically, it's probably some of both: Millennial "user interface designers" trying to force mobile UIs in places where they just don't work.

The cause probably doesn't matter much, though. The end result is that here we are, almost half way through 2017, and the UIs we use today are worse than what we had in 1987.

The remarkable thing about this older software is just how much more usable and sensible the UIs were then compared to the awful "modern" UIs we have to deal with today.

Just look at the SimpleText editor that was commonly used on Macintoshes back in the day. Now compare it to a "modern" text editor UI, like that of GNOME 3's Gedit. It's like night and day! The "ancient" text editor has a clean, sensible, intuitive and usable UI. The "modern" text editor is a dirty, jumbled, messy and impractical UI.

It's not just text editors that are affected, of course. Web browsers today have UIs that are worse than the early Mosaic and Netscape Navigator UIs. The entire desktop environment is much worse today. GNOME 3 is awful in comparison even to the early Mac desktop environment.

We've had 20 to 30 years to improve on the early desktop concepts that the Mac introduced to the public at large. And we actually were making really good progress, up until about 2007 or 2008. Then it all went to hell. Some people will blame it on mobile devices, and some people will blame it on Millennials/hipsters. Realistically, it's probably some of both: Millennial "user interface designers" trying to force mobile UIs in places where they just don't work.

The cause probably doesn't matter much, though. The end result is that here we are, almost half way through 2017, and the UIs we use today are worse than what we had in 1987.

Son, back in my day we had computers... and they had lights on the front panel that showed you the CPU register contents and switches for loading values into those registers. It was awesome.

EEs back in the day had a straightforward default approach to controlling current: you make or break a mechanical contact. None of this monitor the input and switch the machine between a low and high power state nonsense. They were mad for switches, so this is what the front panel of a computer looked like.

And every one of those switches was an individually crafted mechanical masterpiece. They might have been forged in the deeps of time by the dwarves of Tumunzahar. If you flipped one it would emit a mighty clack that would cause a weak millennial, raised on insipid, wishy-washy membrane switches, to curl up into a foetal position. This was electronics for real men who unwound from a day of defeating communism and sending men to the Moon with a martini -- a proper gin martini not a vodka martini (for kids who learned to drink from the movies), or for God's sake an Appletini.

Japanese electronic toilets are standard here in the Western world yet - we've a long way to go.

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

Remember those "Windows error fixer" programs? I had Norton System Works, a supposedly reputable company with Mr. Norton's renowned technical knowledge.

As long as we're going down Nostalgia Lane, I do remember when Norton earned the great name it had (before it was acquired by Symantec in 1990). One of my favorite Dos utilities was the Norton Commander (pre-windows). It made dos file/directory management/navigation so damned easier, probably still easier and faster than modern file managers, as well as program execution. And early (I must stress "early") versions of Norton Utilities for Dos were excellent too. The disk checker and defragger were particularly useful back then.

Whatever else he might have done, at least he didn't hand his country out from under the feet of his people and hand it over to hostile invaders.

Please moderate parent Funny .

I remember back in the early 2000 when I first read about the aerospike engine and saw that stunning picture : https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Quite an impressing concept, the nozzle compensate depending on the altitude to kept it's efficiency on a wide range of altitude. One of the reason of multistage rocket is, of course, to lower the weight to raise efficiency as you climb, but another more subtle reason is also that conventional bell-shaped rocket are only efficient at a narrow range of altitude.

Aerospike engine doesn't have this problem, it stay efficient at all time. And on the plus side, as you can see in the picture above, they look freaking cool.

Read the article on the protestant work ethic.

I did. I read it and many others before I started ranting about Calvinist thought, which did not start with replying to you. Only two mentions of "hard work," and neither goes into any specifics other than being "diligent'.

We have had progressive government programs trying to "help" poor people for a century, and not only have they been ineffective, they are actually the cause of these "structural and societal issues"; there is plenty of evidence for that, you simply refuse to see it.

Except the US has one of the weakest social safety nets of Western nations, and we have the lowest social mobility. I believe it is you that is refusing to look at evidence.

The Spike in pedestrian deaths makes me think of this.

I always thought that. But, when I see videos of jaguars attacking caimans and mongooses and honeybadgers attacking cobras and mambas, I start to realise how adept mammals are at killing. I think we over identify with some of our most lethal cousins. Just because I'm a mammal and I'm not a killing machine doesn't mean a cheetah or wolf pack isn't totally bad ass. WAY more scary than a velociraptor - https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

The best way for a Linux newbie to get started, does not point to any distribution what so ever. The best way for a newbie to start is desire. As a power user, either you want to start or let's be blunt, fuck off and don't waste people's time.

For a typical user, who just wants to consume content, communicate with people via various applications and use the internet, take you pick of distributions here is a list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

For power users, don't be a dick, look it up you fucking self and you know what, plenty of people will help you, have fun. Here is a great image https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... take your pick of Distributions who coloured line reaches 2016 bar. Also if you are already using Android, well guess what, you are already using an Android distribution.

What to play games, well, there is always SteamOS, rather than asking silly questions.

You're sadly mistaken and take a simplistic and narrow view of Athenian democracy. Male citizens over 20 could vote, for example, many posts were decided by lot, most certainly did not have full direct democracy, and had a clear separation between judicial, military and executive. An ancient Athenian visiting the modern US would most certainly see the parallels

I think they've done a good job at that by diverting water from the croplands to some fish somewhere.

This actually worries me more than AGW. And AGW worries me a lot. The situation needs addressed. But we aren't a country that can address much any more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

BTW, most of CA already is a desert.

Exactly. Its a situation where the weather is pretty good, lots of sunshine, OK soil, but not much water. They've wrecked their local sources and when you get soil subsidance like this, http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~... https://ca.water.usgs.gov/land... you've probably made the water table recharge either impossible or a tens of thousands of years effort.

Then we have the river diversion issues. Already the Colorado no longer reaches the sea. Most impressive to stop that river.

If I had a say in how water use in California is handled, I'd say you start with the Sunshine. That's not likely to go away any time soon. So that's good. But the next issue is that water. It has to be used better, and more efficiently. I'm seeing a lot of farming under glass, so to speak. If you are going to use water, you have to meter it out and limit evaporation. If you are going to ship water from another state, you need to keep the damn stuff covered. Gotta watch how we deliver it to the plants though, because drip irrigation is great for saving water but you eventually salinate the soil. https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Inte... https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

We are perhaps a dog that likes to shit in it's dinner bowl.

I've been a web developer for many years. I don't particularly like the entire web stack. Yes, it's shitty in many ways.

But here's the thing: somehow, Microsoft has managed to make an advanced text editor that's responsive, extensible, and enjoyable to use on all of the major platforms. And they've done it using some of those web technologies.

Visual Studio Code is an absolute pleasure to work with compared to IDEs like Eclipse or NetBeans or Intellij. It feels much faster than them, even with this blinking cursor issue (which as a long time Visual Studio Code user I didn't even notice). It's easier to extend. The plugins that others have written are much better. It's a smaller initial download. It's easier to keep updated.

Then there's a native text editor like Gedit. One look at Gedit's UI makes me want to vomit.

Kate is perhaps the only native text editor that isn't a complete joke. But it's too tied to KDE to make it easily usable on non-Linux platforms.

I'd love to use a native or pseudo-native (like Java-based) text editor that offered the benefits of Visual Studio Code. But I've yet to find one that comes anywhere close to comparing to Visual Studio Code.

Rag on the technologies used to build Visual Studio Code all you want. All that I know is that it's a piece of software that works much better than all of its competitors.

I used CDE (and thus Motif) for many years. It may look outdated now, but it was years ahead of its time. While it may not be as usable as, say, GNOME 2 or KDE 3 were, it's actually still managed to be better to use than GNOME 3 or KDE 4+ have been. That's how far our "modern" open source desktop projects have regressed.

Gedit, a simple text editor for GNOME, is a perfect example of how stupid things have gotten. This is what Gedit's UI used to look like, back before the GNOME 3 disaster. And this is a more recent GNOME 3 version of Gedit. It's unbelievable how far it has regressed, and how quickly this has happened.

And that's just a text editor! We see the same sort of nonsense throughout so much of GNOME 3. What were once usable and consistent menus and toolbars have been replaced with jumbled buttons and hamburger menus, among various other idiotic UI changes.

What's worse is that all of these regressions are justified as making the applications "easier to use on tablets", yet most GNOME 3 users are likely using a desktop with a mouse! They've ruined the desktop's entire user experience for a class of users that doesn't even exist!

Hate on Motif if you must. It and CDE provided a much better UI than GNOME 3 ever has or ever will.

I used CDE (and thus Motif) for many years. It may look outdated now, but it was years ahead of its time. While it may not be as usable as, say, GNOME 2 or KDE 3 were, it's actually still managed to be better to use than GNOME 3 or KDE 4+ have been. That's how far our "modern" open source desktop projects have regressed.

Gedit, a simple text editor for GNOME, is a perfect example of how stupid things have gotten. This is what Gedit's UI used to look like, back before the GNOME 3 disaster. And this is a more recent GNOME 3 version of Gedit. It's unbelievable how far it has regressed, and how quickly this has happened.

And that's just a text editor! We see the same sort of nonsense throughout so much of GNOME 3. What were once usable and consistent menus and toolbars have been replaced with jumbled buttons and hamburger menus, among various other idiotic UI changes.

What's worse is that all of these regressions are justified as making the applications "easier to use on tablets", yet most GNOME 3 users are likely using a desktop with a mouse! They've ruined the desktop's entire user experience for a class of users that doesn't even exist!

Hate on Motif if you must. It and CDE provided a much better UI than GNOME 3 ever has or ever will.

It's not about disliking change. People are perfectly fine with good change. We just haven't seen much of that at all lately.

That's because UI designs had pretty much been perfected by 2000. The UI of Windows 2000 was clean, it was consistent, it was intuitive, and it was easy to use.

Just about every UI change since then has been a huge regression. When something is nearly perfect it's hard to make it better, but it's very easy to totally ruin it.

The Gedit text editor is one of the best examples of how once-sensible UIs have gone to hell.

This is what Gedit used to look like, and this is Gedit's newer UI.

The earlier UI has sensible menus and toolbars. It makes efficient use of the space that's provided. It's an efficient UI to learn and to use.

The newer UI is totally inconsistent. The menus and toolbar have been mashed together in an unusable mess. It's hard to tell what's a tab, what's a button, what can be clicked, and what might happen when something is clicked. Overall, it's a real disaster.

And the Gedit UI disaster is similar to what we're seeing across the board. Sensible UI conventions that had years of study, thought and evaluation put into them were thrown away for no good reason at all. This is affecting closed source software, open source software, and web design.

Newer UIs are subjectively and objectively worse than older UI designs.

It's not about disliking change. People are perfectly fine with good change. We just haven't seen much of that at all lately.

That's because UI designs had pretty much been perfected by 2000. The UI of Windows 2000 was clean, it was consistent, it was intuitive, and it was easy to use.

Just about every UI change since then has been a huge regression. When something is nearly perfect it's hard to make it better, but it's very easy to totally ruin it.

The Gedit text editor is one of the best examples of how once-sensible UIs have gone to hell.

This is what Gedit used to look like, and this is Gedit's newer UI.

The earlier UI has sensible menus and toolbars. It makes efficient use of the space that's provided. It's an efficient UI to learn and to use.

The newer UI is totally inconsistent. The menus and toolbar have been mashed together in an unusable mess. It's hard to tell what's a tab, what's a button, what can be clicked, and what might happen when something is clicked. Overall, it's a real disaster.

And the Gedit UI disaster is similar to what we're seeing across the board. Sensible UI conventions that had years of study, thought and evaluation put into them were thrown away for no good reason at all. This is affecting closed source software, open source software, and web design.

Newer UIs are subjectively and objectively worse than older UI designs.

Whoa there dude. Practically everything in that paragraph has something wrong with it.

I don't think that's a supportable opinion.

Did you mean viable? Because plenty of people hold and support that position.

If religions were not useful for propagating a people and culture into the future we wouldn't have so many religions that have endured for thousands of years.

By that logic addictive substances wouldn't have endured for thousands of years and we wouldn't have so many. People have been using and abusing opium for a long time, but you have to do some pretty serious libertarian-grade mental gymnastics to say that opium dens are a net gain.

And areligious people tend to not have children, so their culture dies out.

So the Mormons and Muslims are going to inherit the world? I understand the concept of outbreeding the competition... but that doesn't seem like the best solution in today's modern world with the whole lack of resources thing and limited fossil fuel situation.

Indeed, having fewer kids seems to be the consensus among developed nations. Religion or no. I'd even go so far as to say that's the rational viewpoint. Especially when your retirement plans aren't "hope one of the children feed you".

Religion must have been a net positive (even if locally negative for those who don't conform to the predominant religion) because otherwise, the areligious would have had an evolutionary advantage over the religious and would have dominated and killed them off millennia ago. Instead just the opposite happened.

It's not a gene. It's not something you inherit from your parents. You could be talking about how much people appreciate Shakespeare. Do you think that gives people a evolutionary edge to out-compete the rest?

"The opposite happened"? Care to name an areligious group of people that were killed off by a religious group 1000+ years ago? PLENTY of examples of two religions making war upon each other, but I don't think that's helping your case.

Furthermore, if you're talking about evolutionary time-scales, and ideas rather than gene-pools, the decline of religious participation indicates that it might be on it's way out. But I doubt it will ever completely disappear.

You can certainly argue that religion was or is a net gain for society. And there are plenty of valid points to that effect. But all of these arguments are just plain bad.

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

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

That only applies to Paramount Pictures.

Nobody's ever flown a train into a building.

Well, except for this guy...

I live near a pumped storage plant. They are spending close to a billion dollars replacing the turbine blades. Using this site https://upload.wikimedia.org/w..., I see that the deepest part of Lake Michigan is only around 30 miles from that pumped storage plant. They already have the transmission lines at the pumped storage plant so they could put one at the deepest point of Lake Michigan and put windmills above it. The windmills could be placed so that they could not be seen from shore. If all this could be made for less than a billion dollars and it could provide for about 2 gigawatts of power than I hope someone will do it here.

It's really capacitor charge time. In CMOS technology, you basically have a metallic plate (the gate) sitting on some semi conductor (separated by an insulator).

As electrons flow into the 'plate', they accumulate. This creates an electric field which pushes electrons in the semiconductor away creating a channel of 'holes'. It's through this channel that electrons can flow (drain to source). Note that the electrons moving through the CMOS gate are typically sent to another transistor. And as soon as that plate fills up with electrons, current stops flowing through the device. And since power = current x voltage (IxV), you only dissipate power while the device is switching and this is why there is more current drain (and heating) the faster that you switch. Leakage current blah blah disclaimers.

CMOS Transistor

Learn just a LITTLE physics and you will see that YOU are wrong (and TFA). There is no frequency that does not absorb over atmospheric distances, plus when it hits any solid object. There are only frequencies with LOWER absorption, which is meaningless for these kinds of path lengths.

I've learned a little bit of physics, and while technically true, what you say is misleading. Visible light, for example, doesn't absorb very much in air (yeah sure, there's some). The air is "optically thin" at visible wavelengths, which means more light is getting through from space to us than not: 75% of the energy integrated over all wavelengths gets down here: most of what's not getting through isn't the visible bits (yay for the ozone layer).

So, if they can shift energy to come out at 10 microns, which is in a clear bit of the spectrum almost as nice as around 5000 angstroms (visible light), what they say is right: 10 micron IR radiated upwards is mostly checking out back into space.

Just make sure you're not putting the fancy new film under solid objects, go read about the laws of thermodynamics, solve your favorite radiative transfer equation, and *poof*: cooler thing than you had started with.

Wrong. There's a very noticeable difference in a 1080p and 4k video source even on a 1080p TV, due to chroma subsampling.

A standard 4:2:0 4k video downsampled to 4:4:4 1080p ends up with a full 1920x1080 chroma samples. That's 4x as many chroma samples as Blu-ray or broadcast TV (at 4:2:0 1080p = only 960x560 chroma samples).

See for yourself: Comparison of 4:1:1, 4:2:0, 4:2:2 and 4:4:4

Now if only companies like Intel would actually provide

Yes, if only ...

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

So what you're saying is that there haven't been radical near-instant (in geological terms) 'spikes' of warmth about every 120k for the last 3+ million years?

Funny, that's pretty much what that graph shows to me.

Hell, its getting worse and worse today, as that it is getting to where a majority of modern females not only are overweight and obese, but we are NOW actually telling everyone "this is ok"

In West Africa and much of the Pacific Islands, men have a preference for obese women. In fact, the oldest beauty standard statue we have is a fairly obese woman.

Personally, I'm attracted more to less obese women, but I don't pretend that it's some product of millions of years of evolution so I can feel superior about it.

You just didn't comprehend.

How many people are living at the bottom of Lake Roosevelt, in it's 400 square kilometer footprint? A lake that is entirely man-made by the Grand Coulee Dam in eastern Washington state. How many squirrels, sword ferns, and fir trees? Zero. There's even pictures of the last tree in the reservoir zone being cut down. Also in the zone: eleven towns, two railroads, three state highways, about one hundred and fifty miles of country roads, four sawmills, fourteen bridges, four telegraph and telephone systems, and many power lines and cemeteries. All facilities had to be purchased or relocated, and 3,000 residents were relocated.

However, how much energy do we harvest from this one dam on the mighty Columbia river? 6,800 MW. It's the largest generating station in the United States. And there's 10 more dams downriver that also generate power besides this one, and three more upriver in Canada.

Hydroelectric does have it's costs, and they often get whitewashed away.

The irony is that the French Revolution led to the Napoleonic Wars, which Denmark losing Norway, which led to them clamping down on their other strikecolonies/striketerritories, which led to resentment, the Icelandic independence movement, and ultimately independence from Denmark.

Yeah, Laki was really horrific. It's hard for polar volcanoes to affect the climate like equatorial ones do, but the scale of the amount of gas released was nonetheless so great that the Mississippi froze at New Orleans. The African and Indian monsoon failed, leading to severe famine in Egypt; 6 million people died. Benjamin Franklin was the first person to correctly attribute the cause of the weather to an Icelandic volcano eruption (although he incorrectly stated it as Hekla, which seems to have been the only Icelandic volcano that people in that timeperiod seemed to know, due to its habit of dusting mainland Europe with ash ;) )

Once every 100-200 years Iceland has some truly catastrophic eruption. Laki has had two since the settlement period. Askja, Katla, and Hekla are other sources. Barðarbunga is a real giant (largest lava eruption of the Holocene), but it hasn't had any catastropic eruptions in a while. It's still quaking up a storm since it's last "little" one (little by its standards, still bigger (both volume and flow rate) than any eruption Mauna Loa has ever had).

This axon is 1.5 micrometers thick: https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

And its also myelinated. While I certainly like to be optimistic, I do think it will take some time and some additional effort until it gets down to this scale.

Exclusive!! Here's a picture of the prototype!

and I'm not at all sure one gains the same value from coding as from foreign languages.

You don't say... ;-)

And this is one of the reasons we are moving to Microsoft for our email and file storage. I have no idea why the 4th amendment only applies to Microsoft, not to Google, but so be it.

If you're worried about the government reading your emails, why risk using a USA company at all? Use a company that has no USA presence at all. Or better, roll your own offshore and control your own encryption keys.

Of course according to Trump, aliens are not people. I wonder whether he can find a corrupt judge to support that argument.

He's right there... aliens aren't always people, sometimes they are lizards, sometimes they are amorphous blobs

Here it is pictorally. We're currently warmer than even the Medieval Warm Period.

Note: the (in)famous "hockey stick" graph only covered the Little Ice Age period from about 1400 to present. That was one of the reasons I didn't like "An Inconvenient Truth" even though I agreed with the overall message. When you cherry pick data to try to exaggerate what is already a good point, you just give fodder to the opposition. The above graph would've been just as effective as the hockey stick graph, without being deceptive and providing an easy counterpoint.

"And what's wrong with that?" people may say, "that just means people are getting paid the equivalent today for the same work."

Which would be true, except that wages haven't matched increases in productivity.

In a healthy economy, gains are distributed so that people have disposable income to feed new markets. The flat wages mean there is less opportunity in the domestic economy. We have a "trickle-up" system in the US.

What's next? Let's all go back to watching movies on VHS and old CRTs! It's how the director wanted it to be seen, right? How about analogue cellphones and leaded gasoline?

I still have in use an old Sony 33 inch CRT with Trinitron tube. It's standard definition of course but the quality it's really good, the black is black and the colours are quide good. I don't need a soundbar to get a decent soud, because due the fact the case has to be big, it's not a proble to put in a couple of 16 cm woofers. And sit switches on in seconds because doesn't have to boot a complex OS to enable the 'smart' functions. It' has no DRM functions and the user interface is intuitive. If I want Smart TV function, I've hooked a Raspberry Pi.
Please let me explain why I should thrash it and buy a tincan-sounding washed picture and bug ridden LCD television?
The long playing has a big advantage on CD and is that due the limitations of the medium it's not feasible go in the loudness compression war that hapens with digital formats, so and older mastering for vynils sounds better with a modern remastering with all the tracks overcompressed and a dynamic range of 6 dB on a 96 dB capable medium, and of course it's really fifficult install malware with a record even if theoretically possible https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...