Germany's subsidies for renewable energy are about to run out in 2011, mainly because they've reached their goal of massively increasing the renewable share of the energy mix in Germany. We're currently exceeding the quotas for rewewable production set in the 2000 agreement.
In the meantime, nuclear operators still receive a massive subsidy by the state limiting their liability in case anything goes wrong. No private company will insure a nuclear power plant construction effort and if they would, nuclear power would be prohibitively expensive.
So let me get this right. Your country has spent considerable money already over decades and you have yet to come up with a sustainable and green energy source? Why do you want to give them more money?
You don't know what you're talking about. We've already had a consensus to phase out nuclear energy in 2000 and that agreement contained concrete goals for renewable energy capacity that we're currently exceeding. Why do you think it is that Germany produces 16% of its electricity needs through renewables when the world's average is just a measly 1%? Because we've committed early to a nuclear-free world and made a plan to reach that goal.
If you're referring to the Asse, it is my understanding that no nuclear waste from reactors is dumped there, but only lightly irradiated garbage coming from the medical and research community.
Nuclear waste usually goes to Sellafield and La Hague, before being stored in a "temporary" (read: for the forseeable future, because we don't know where to put it elsewhere) place above ground.
More than you would think, but I guess your point was that none of them could have knocked out a nuclear reactor.
OTOH, some parts in Germany are suspectible to severe flooding. And our oldest nuclear plants cannot even withstand a crash by a small plane like a Cessna.
Germany already produces 16% of its energy from renewables. The agreement reached in 2000 to phase out nuclear energy contained concrete goals for renewables, and we are not only meeting, but exceeding them.
This decision has been 30 years in the making, in fact a political party was founded just to address it. When they came into power in 1998 through a coalition, they DID address it and in 2000 reached an agreement with the energy companies to phase out nuclear energy over 20 years. However, in the mean-time another coalition got elected and they got greedy, let themselves be bribed by the nuclear operators and decided to break the previously reached consensus and let the nukes run another 12 years against the will of the vast majority of the German people. Then Fukushima happened and scared by the possibility of election losses (which since then have materialized) the current administration did an transparent about-face and (temporarily) shut down the 7 oldest reactors in Germany.
So the current decision is mostly a return to a previously agreed policy, which was hazardly discarded by the current government.
BTW, the 2000 agreement contained phased goals for renewable energy production. At the moment, we have not only met these goals but exceeded them by 30-50% IIRC. So everybody who says that Germany will not meet its CO2 targets because it phases out nuclear is full of shit. The goal is NOT to replace one fossil fuel with another.
I just want to add that even with 13 of its nuclear 17 reactors shut down last week-end because of repairs and other reasons, the agency responsible for the electricity network announced that Germany was not importing electricity from abroad. So the GP is full of shit.
First of all, the geological record in Japan contains proof of previous tsunamis of the same height as the most recent one and presumably caused by an earthquake of similar strength. So your decision to only count earthquakes of which there is a seismological record while excluding other data is somewhat arbitrary.
Secondly, the 1952 Kamchatka earthquake, although it occurred north of Japan, was also a 9.0-magnitude quake, did result in a tsunami, and most importantly, was caused by the same fault line that brought us the recent quake.
In other words, the GP's use of plural is completely justified.
I was always under the impression that the electron was a 0-dimensional point, i.e. it has no size, just a charge.
I know, it doesn't sound intuitive, but then the table I'm sitting at mostly consists of vacuum, yet it feels solid when I knock on it.
Thinking about it, if the electron has mass it should also have a size. Ah, screw it, I'm gonna stick with computers and leave particle physics to the experts.
Especially, when you can simply `open` it on a Mac (opens in Preview.app) or `display` it on Linux (using ImageMagick). I just tried it, by catting a PDF file and that turned out to be rather annoying, because it broke scrolling in the terminal window.
Some of the features are nice, for example the filename completion (way better than pressing tab). But it's missing automation, so basically it's useless.
Most Gnome apps require an X server under OS X meaning they suck donkey balls. They don't use the global menu, copy-and-paste works differently, and they generally don't "look right." I have seen GTK-applications compiled natively for Aqua and while the situation is better from a UI point of view, the build process is the worst thing I've ever encountered. For instance, Gnucash requires to be installed into/opt and insists on starting its own dbus instance (even though there's already one running) and doesn't bother to terminate it when finished.
Having said that, I love the Unix support that comes with OS X. I get much of my work done on the command line (mutt FTW) or in programs that started out on Unix and were adapted to the OS X GUI such as MacVim and Aquamacs (an Emacs clone).
I remember a horrid computer science lecture where the the professor basically copied the K&R book onto transparencies to teach C. As I had read through the very same book a few months before I skipped all of the classes after the first. I was later told that when it came to teaching Perl, he resorted to copying man pages.
According to these articles, reactor no. 1 experienced some kind of problem (sudden drop of pressure) 10 minutes after the earthquake and well before the tsunami struck. The crew then had some troubles with the cooling system of said reactor but the articles are pretty vague in that regard. This is according to TEPCO's own reports.
Anyway, I've always maintained that the assertion that the earthquake did no damage in Fukushima (and therefore other nuclear plants are "safe") was nothing but a myth pushed by nuclear apologists in their own self-interest. It's nice to see some factual reporting backing up my thesis, by the nuke operator no less.
By that measure the UK is not self-sustainable, seeing that they import most of their food stuffs. There's no need for our stations in Antarctica to be self-sustaining, because it's easy to ship the stuff that they need.
But the West has condemned what's happening in Syria. And at least here in Germany it's still on the evening news every other day. Compare that to Bahrain were the West really has been mostly silent.
NK is even more isolated than Libya. It's lucky (?) to be in what China considers its sphere of influence, but they are not allies, not by a long shot.
Where does it say anything about only protecting political speech?
That's what the word means in the context/domain of the constitution or law in general. That is why screaming fire in a theater is punishable, even though it's speech -- in a literal sense.
The intent doesn't matter. What matters is what is actually wrote down. Trying to guess the intent would be disastrous because people usually have different interpretations of it.
The US has interpreted the intent of the constitution for the last 200 years. That's what judicial review is all about. Do you think the Supreme Court is just a prize for retired judges? And the best thing is that everybody can make up his own opinion -- not only judges. Because in a society people constantly renegotiate the standards of living, and the US constitution is just a framework for that.
If you don't believe what some guy on Slashdot is telling you, why not go back to the people who wrote the text in the first place. They were pretty prolific writers and very clear about what they really meant. And more often than not, they couldn't agree, which is why the constitution is full of compromises. Like the slavery issue (slaves count as 3/5 people -- WTF?) or the fact that the Bill of Rights was not part of the original text and only added later (a strong faction believed it "unnecessary", including the first amendment!).
Welcome to the world of politics. The West intervened in Libya because Gaddafi somehow [1] managed to alienate everybody (who counts) in the world. He had no friends left. OTOH, Syria is allied with Iran. And while China isn't exactly a friend of North Korea, they'd still object to Western intervention so close to home (as they did 60 years ago).
It has nothing to do with double standards or hypocrisy. It's all about choosing the battles you can win and avoiding those you'll lose, so you can fight another time.
[1] Which was quite a feat, if you think about it.
That's what I did when I had Adeona installed. The laptop automatically boots into a honeypot account, while my actual account is encrypted. Then Adeona went offline and I got a new laptop, where I didn't bother to replicate the setup.
Political contributions are speech. A T-Shirt with the DeCSS source code is speech. In both cases you're not speaking literally, but expressing yourself in a non-verbal way. That intent is political, that's why it's protected. If you're harassing someone verbally, it's (usually) not political and therefore not protected. You're not expressing a political belief, just that you're a jerk. (And being a jerk is not protected, society has many recourses against abusive behavior that don't involve the law.)
You must divorce yourself from the literal text of the constitution and think about what the intent of the text is. Contemporary and modern commentary is helpful. Words can carry a specific meaning in a given domain that is not apparent from their literal sense. And in law, "speech" is any kind of expression. And the first amendment doesn't concern itself with any kind of speech, but political speech (a very broad categorization in itself, almost any art falls under it, but for instance science generally does not.)
I think you're talking the word "speech" too literal. Freedom of speech is also often called freedom of expression, emphasizing that the intent of the speech is important. Political speech and art is what is protected, merely opening and closing one's mouth isn't. You can't just engage in abusive behavior and hide behind free speech. That's not what the first amendment is about.
No, coercion is required when people behave badly and do not respond to other measures. You can't just walk up to someone who is a dick and punch him in the face.
Having said that, I agree that there are some situations where coercion is the only option left. That's why I said generally in my previous post.
There is a distinct difference between holding a belief and stating it in a public forum, and going to someone's house and yelling your belief at them or abusing them for their beliefs.
Both are speech. The locations and situations may be different, but they are speech nonetheless.
The first is speech, the second is speech and harassment. It's the latter that gets prosecuted.
Slashdot Mirror
Germany's subsidies for renewable energy are about to run out in 2011, mainly because they've reached their goal of massively increasing the renewable share of the energy mix in Germany. We're currently exceeding the quotas for rewewable production set in the 2000 agreement.
In the meantime, nuclear operators still receive a massive subsidy by the state limiting their liability in case anything goes wrong. No private company will insure a nuclear power plant construction effort and if they would, nuclear power would be prohibitively expensive.
So let me get this right. Your country has spent considerable money already over decades and you have yet to come up with a sustainable and green energy source? Why do you want to give them more money?
You don't know what you're talking about. We've already had a consensus to phase out nuclear energy in 2000 and that agreement contained concrete goals for renewable energy capacity that we're currently exceeding. Why do you think it is that Germany produces 16% of its electricity needs through renewables when the world's average is just a measly 1%? Because we've committed early to a nuclear-free world and made a plan to reach that goal.
If you're referring to the Asse, it is my understanding that no nuclear waste from reactors is dumped there, but only lightly irradiated garbage coming from the medical and research community.
Nuclear waste usually goes to Sellafield and La Hague, before being stored in a "temporary" (read: for the forseeable future, because we don't know where to put it elsewhere) place above ground.
More than you would think, but I guess your point was that none of them could have knocked out a nuclear reactor.
OTOH, some parts in Germany are suspectible to severe flooding. And our oldest nuclear plants cannot even withstand a crash by a small plane like a Cessna.
Germany already produces 16% of its energy from renewables. The agreement reached in 2000 to phase out nuclear energy contained concrete goals for renewables, and we are not only meeting, but exceeding them.
In other words, you're full of shit.
This decision has been 30 years in the making, in fact a political party was founded just to address it. When they came into power in 1998 through a coalition, they DID address it and in 2000 reached an agreement with the energy companies to phase out nuclear energy over 20 years. However, in the mean-time another coalition got elected and they got greedy, let themselves be bribed by the nuclear operators and decided to break the previously reached consensus and let the nukes run another 12 years against the will of the vast majority of the German people. Then Fukushima happened and scared by the possibility of election losses (which since then have materialized) the current administration did an transparent about-face and (temporarily) shut down the 7 oldest reactors in Germany.
So the current decision is mostly a return to a previously agreed policy, which was hazardly discarded by the current government.
BTW, the 2000 agreement contained phased goals for renewable energy production. At the moment, we have not only met these goals but exceeded them by 30-50% IIRC. So everybody who says that Germany will not meet its CO2 targets because it phases out nuclear is full of shit. The goal is NOT to replace one fossil fuel with another.
More like 35% in 3007, but essentially correct. Data from RWE: http://rwecom.online-report.eu/factbook/en/marketdata/electricity/grid/germanyimportandexportofelectricity.html
I just want to add that even with 13 of its nuclear 17 reactors shut down last week-end because of repairs and other reasons, the agency responsible for the electricity network announced that Germany was not importing electricity from abroad. So the GP is full of shit.
Oh, and here's a source for your overcapacity claim, in case somebody asks: http://rwecom.online-report.eu/factbook/en/marketdata/electricity/grid/germanyimportandexportofelectricity.html
First of all, the geological record in Japan contains proof of previous tsunamis of the same height as the most recent one and presumably caused by an earthquake of similar strength. So your decision to only count earthquakes of which there is a seismological record while excluding other data is somewhat arbitrary.
Secondly, the 1952 Kamchatka earthquake, although it occurred north of Japan, was also a 9.0-magnitude quake, did result in a tsunami, and most importantly, was caused by the same fault line that brought us the recent quake.
In other words, the GP's use of plural is completely justified.
I was always under the impression that the electron was a 0-dimensional point, i.e. it has no size, just a charge.
I know, it doesn't sound intuitive, but then the table I'm sitting at mostly consists of vacuum, yet it feels solid when I knock on it.
Thinking about it, if the electron has mass it should also have a size. Ah, screw it, I'm gonna stick with computers and leave particle physics to the experts.
Especially, when you can simply `open` it on a Mac (opens in Preview.app) or `display` it on Linux (using ImageMagick). I just tried it, by catting a PDF file and that turned out to be rather annoying, because it broke scrolling in the terminal window.
Some of the features are nice, for example the filename completion (way better than pressing tab). But it's missing automation, so basically it's useless.
Most Gnome apps require an X server under OS X meaning they suck donkey balls. They don't use the global menu, copy-and-paste works differently, and they generally don't "look right." I have seen GTK-applications compiled natively for Aqua and while the situation is better from a UI point of view, the build process is the worst thing I've ever encountered. For instance, Gnucash requires to be installed into /opt and insists on starting its own dbus instance (even though there's already one running) and doesn't bother to terminate it when finished.
Having said that, I love the Unix support that comes with OS X. I get much of my work done on the command line (mutt FTW) or in programs that started out on Unix and were adapted to the OS X GUI such as MacVim and Aquamacs (an Emacs clone).
I remember a horrid computer science lecture where the the professor basically copied the K&R book onto transparencies to teach C. As I had read through the very same book a few months before I skipped all of the classes after the first. I was later told that when it came to teaching Perl, he resorted to copying man pages.
Here's a better writeup:
Mainichi Daily News: http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110517p2a00m0na008000c.html
taz (German): http://taz.de/1/zukunft/umwelt/artikel/1/tepcos-verteidigung-broeckelt/
According to these articles, reactor no. 1 experienced some kind of problem (sudden drop of pressure) 10 minutes after the earthquake and well before the tsunami struck. The crew then had some troubles with the cooling system of said reactor but the articles are pretty vague in that regard. This is according to TEPCO's own reports.
Anyway, I've always maintained that the assertion that the earthquake did no damage in Fukushima (and therefore other nuclear plants are "safe") was nothing but a myth pushed by nuclear apologists in their own self-interest. It's nice to see some factual reporting backing up my thesis, by the nuke operator no less.
By that measure the UK is not self-sustainable, seeing that they import most of their food stuffs. There's no need for our stations in Antarctica to be self-sustaining, because it's easy to ship the stuff that they need.
But the West has condemned what's happening in Syria. And at least here in Germany it's still on the evening news every other day. Compare that to Bahrain were the West really has been mostly silent.
NK is even more isolated than Libya. It's lucky (?) to be in what China considers its sphere of influence, but they are not allies, not by a long shot.
All that matters to me is what is present in the constitution.
If you want to limit yourself intellectually in that way, then we just have to agree to disagree.
Where does it say anything about only protecting political speech?
That's what the word means in the context/domain of the constitution or law in general. That is why screaming fire in a theater is punishable, even though it's speech -- in a literal sense.
The intent doesn't matter. What matters is what is actually wrote down. Trying to guess the intent would be disastrous because people usually have different interpretations of it.
The US has interpreted the intent of the constitution for the last 200 years. That's what judicial review is all about. Do you think the Supreme Court is just a prize for retired judges? And the best thing is that everybody can make up his own opinion -- not only judges. Because in a society people constantly renegotiate the standards of living, and the US constitution is just a framework for that.
If you don't believe what some guy on Slashdot is telling you, why not go back to the people who wrote the text in the first place. They were pretty prolific writers and very clear about what they really meant. And more often than not, they couldn't agree, which is why the constitution is full of compromises. Like the slavery issue (slaves count as 3/5 people -- WTF?) or the fact that the Bill of Rights was not part of the original text and only added later (a strong faction believed it "unnecessary", including the first amendment!).
I see your 3 letters and raise to 4: Iran.
Welcome to the world of politics. The West intervened in Libya because Gaddafi somehow [1] managed to alienate everybody (who counts) in the world. He had no friends left. OTOH, Syria is allied with Iran. And while China isn't exactly a friend of North Korea, they'd still object to Western intervention so close to home (as they did 60 years ago).
It has nothing to do with double standards or hypocrisy. It's all about choosing the battles you can win and avoiding those you'll lose, so you can fight another time.
[1] Which was quite a feat, if you think about it.
That's what I did when I had Adeona installed. The laptop automatically boots into a honeypot account, while my actual account is encrypted. Then Adeona went offline and I got a new laptop, where I didn't bother to replicate the setup.
Political contributions are speech. A T-Shirt with the DeCSS source code is speech. In both cases you're not speaking literally, but expressing yourself in a non-verbal way. That intent is political, that's why it's protected. If you're harassing someone verbally, it's (usually) not political and therefore not protected. You're not expressing a political belief, just that you're a jerk. (And being a jerk is not protected, society has many recourses against abusive behavior that don't involve the law.)
You must divorce yourself from the literal text of the constitution and think about what the intent of the text is. Contemporary and modern commentary is helpful. Words can carry a specific meaning in a given domain that is not apparent from their literal sense. And in law, "speech" is any kind of expression. And the first amendment doesn't concern itself with any kind of speech, but political speech (a very broad categorization in itself, almost any art falls under it, but for instance science generally does not.)
I think you're talking the word "speech" too literal. Freedom of speech is also often called freedom of expression, emphasizing that the intent of the speech is important. Political speech and art is what is protected, merely opening and closing one's mouth isn't. You can't just engage in abusive behavior and hide behind free speech. That's not what the first amendment is about.
No, coercion is required when people behave badly and do not respond to other measures. You can't just walk up to someone who is a dick and punch him in the face.
Having said that, I agree that there are some situations where coercion is the only option left. That's why I said generally in my previous post.
There is a distinct difference between holding a belief and stating it in a public forum, and going to someone's house and yelling your belief at them or abusing them for their beliefs.
Both are speech. The locations and situations may be different, but they are speech nonetheless.
The first is speech, the second is speech and harassment. It's the latter that gets prosecuted.