That's another thing. How absurd is it that fines for local violations like speeding and traffic cameras in the US go to those entities enforcing them? Could you design a worse conflict of interest if you tried? How can anyone think that such a system is appropriate?
Yes, they do. And since the government needs the information anyway (for your taxes), why shouldn't they just collect it in the first place? Why make you do it for them, and then have to randomly audit you if they think you're lying?
Note that you can add / remove / change information on your tax returns in Iceland if you think something is incorrect or lacking. But I've never found a reason to. I doubt the vast majority of people do either.
A bit of an aside, but I heard country music for the first time in about four years last weekend. And the reason for that was because I was in the US last weekend;)
The banking system difference really gets me. Banks here don't even accept checks any more, they're considered antiquated technology. All banking systems are unified. Medical records systems are unified. Government records systems are unified. You know how I fill out my taxes? I go to a web page, log in, click "confirm" on several pages (because the information is almost invariably correct, as it's automatically collected), and click to submit. It takes about two minutes.
I agree, lots of major technologies are developed in the US, yet it seems peoples' everyday experiences are technologically backwards. It's a bit of a paradox.
1) You have a far higher population density (about 100x the land but about 1000x the population). That makes things easier. You're not located on an unstable volcanic rock with extreme weather conditions in the middle of the North Atlantic with little domestic production. Again, that makes it easier for you.
2) For more specifics, believe it or not, the Ring Road is not the only road in Iceland. There's 24-32 thousand kilometers of roads in Iceland (the exact number depends on how bad of roads you consider)
3) So are you saying that there is no such sensor network in the US? Why?
Personally, I hate all of these "arguments through incredulity" that you encounter whenever it comes from energy, trying to argue that we can't expand fossil fuels fast enoigh, alternative fuels, solar power, wind power, nuclear power, you name it based on your ideology, fast enough to meet demand. It's always along the lines of "We'd have to build X units every Y days, and doesn't that numver sound impossibly large?"
Well, *everything* we do with energy is on unthinkably large scales. We spend a huge chunk of our entire planet's gdp, billions of man-years per year, on it. Arguments through incredulity gloss over this. When arguing against a given tech - as this article does with carbon capture - it's not enough to just act incredulous, you need to do a fibancial analysis (which on large scales is not trivial)
Also they do the "all or nothing" faælacy as well. It's perfectly acceptable ro pursue carbon capture at the same time as other technologies. More to the point, until one is sure that a particular solution is the be-all end-all in a particular field, it's only logical.
There's no shortage of potential routes to cost reduction. It all comes down to funding. And the funding has to be stable, and not come with "mandates" - the two main things that have hindered NASA's work over the years.
Simultaneously attempt four or five "huge leap forward" technologies and you're likely to end up with one or two succeeding.
Ugh... "still lose", not "still loose".... that's one of my personal pet peeves, and now I made it myself (due to a typo, but still, that's no excuse!)
Except that not only are costs trends in the space industry not comparable to computers and smartphones... they don't even track with the general economy. NASA budgets based on the NNSI, the Nasa New Start Index. It's a higher inflation rate than common metrics like the CPI.
The reason for this is that common metrics are based on a grab-bag of consumer goods. Over time consumer goods have shifted from being hand-produced by domestic labour to mass produced in factories with cheap overseas labour. Meanwhile, however, rockets continue to involve large amounts of manual labour by highly trained individuals.
Nor does rocketry have some sort of amazing tech advance that's been driving it down. Fuels have changed little in recent decades. Engine efficiencies have drifted up and stage masses down, but there have been no spectacular leaps. Dreams of major leaps forward, such as the Shuttle, VentureStar, etc have played out poorly. That doesn't mean that they always will - it's just that the situation as it stands isn't rosy.
Don't get me wrong, I do think there's hope. One, companies like SpaceX that start from scratch and thus can apply "lessons learned" from scratch are at a big advantage, as well as not having to make hard decisions about what sort of legacy "baggage" is worth keeping around. Secondly, smart design approaches can help keep costs down. SpaceX, for example, manages to get some degree of mass production on its engines by using so many that are identical (or virtually identical, in the case of the vacuum versions with the extended nozzle) on every launch. And with the Heavy they'll step that up even more. The upper and lower stage cores are also very similar, and the boosters on the Heavy will also be very similar to the cores. So they get some degree of economies of scale, and a lot more unit testing on at least the engines (not as much with the cores, unfortunately, and that's come back to bite them - the downside to starting over is that it's a total reset on system reliability). From a technological standpoint, using new (by space industry standards) manufacturing techniques like friction stir welding, and balancing ground handling costs with rocket performance (aka, the "semi-balloon tank" design, where the rocket is strong enough to support itself unfilled but not strong enough to withstand launch forces without pressurant) also improve their cost performance. If someone - SpaceX or others - can mange to get cost effective stage reuse to work, then that would be another big boost. So there is hope.
But as far as the past decades have gone, comparing rocketry to computers and cell phones has been anything but an apt comparison.
I think a lot of people confuse the possibility of social mobility with the probability of social mobility.
Think of it like the difficulty setting on a game. Difficulty settings can range from the ridiculously easy to the virtually impossible. Likewise, different players have different skill levels in how good they are at the game. If the game had the same difficulty setting for everyone, comparing in-game scores/accomplishments/times would be an easy way to compare how good players are at the game.
But it's not that way, because you have difficulty settings. A person can be quite good at a game, but still loose because they choose to play it on a tough difficulty setting. Likewise, a person can really suck at a game but still win because they chose to play it on an easy setting. Now, there always will be some people who are so good that they'll win at the toughest settings and some people who are so bad that they'll still lose on the easiest settings. But lots of quite good players will still fail when the settings are hard enough, and lots of quite bad players will still succeed when it's easy.
We enter life with a variety of factors that influence our "difficulty settings" that we all have to play on. A white cis straight man with wealthy, college-educated parents raised in a good household is probably going to be playing on "easy". A poor black gay or trans woman with poor, high-school-educated parents raised in a bad environment, with no healthcare, loaded in debt from day one, having to work to support their family, limited transportation options, etc? Not so much. Will some of the former fail, and some of the latter succeed? Of course! But the odds of it are skewed. Many if not most people who would have been quite successful had they been on a level playing field will fail, and vice versa.
I, for one, support giving everyone access to the easier difficulty settings. I don't think it's a good thing for an economy when you have potential talent not being realized and people who really should be working a cash register in management. More to the point, the cost to the economy is almost unfathomably large. So if it takes some money to make this happen? So be it. Social mobility isn't just about the technical possibility of moving from one economic reality to another; it's about the practical reality of it, and how much merit and ability are able to overcome social inertia for the majority of players in the system.
No, in 28 flights, and this would have been 29. You don't define a failure rate by "what is the narrowest bounds that I can choose that will give the worst-sounding number"?
Several percent failure is normal for rocketry (different figures are cited depending on how you measure, often 95%, although IMHO that's too pessimistic for modern rocketry). SpaceX was running 96,4% before this failure, although that's obviously biased upwards by measuring immediately before failure. They're now 93,1%, although that's conversly biased downward by measuring immediately after a failure. For a company that has designed the rocket almost from scratch rather than relying on legacy, proven technology, that isn't in the slightest a bad record. Furthermore, the CRS-7 failure wasn't their fault (except to the extent that they actually trusted that manufacturer certifications are worth the paper they're printed on), and in this case, the jury is still out as to how much responsibility they actually bear for the failure (even ignoring the whole "sabotage" angle, they don't make the COPVs - and you can't test every COPV to find its fatigue/stress/thermal cycling limit because if you do, well, it's destroyed; they don't fail gracefully, so the best you can do is a statistical sampling of them (which they'd already at least been doing with the struts, which turned out to not be good enough)).
And I think "crash" really is the operative word. Look at the Hoba meteorite. This was a natural object, not something shaped by man to be some sort of optimal entry shape or set on some optimal entry trajectory. Yet it lost only a fraction of its mass during entry and landed intact on the surface. We absolutely can do that and better. Forget trying to "land" mined asteroid material with a spacecraft - it only needs to be shaped, sintered, and ejected onto a proper intercept trajectory. Nature has already demonstrated for us that this technique works. As if it'd be hard to find some place willing to donate up land for the landing ellipse in exchange for a cut of the profits (land that could still be farmed / grazed / etc, so long as people are away when returns are expected), whether it be asian steppes, Saharan desert, Canadian tundra, etc.
You yourself just named two energy sources (hardly the only ones we use). Let's add some more.
1) Wood fire. Which not just increased safety, health, and comfort, but ultimately led to primitive metallurgy, allowing first for the bronze age, then with later improvements the iron age.
2) Animal power. Domestication of animals and the use of their muscle power for human needs led to a vast increase in the ability to transport goods and people, farm the land, and operate early "industry" (such as oxen yoked to a mill)
3) Fats. Early lighting, and in some cases heating needs often revolved the combustion of fats and waxes. Initially plant and animal fat sources dominated; marine sources ("whale oil") later became more popular.
4) Kerosene. Used as a light and sometimes heat source; it steadily replaced fats for this purpose. Technically "oil", but was used very differently.
5) Water. Early on mills were used to grind grain, and later to run early industries (often still called "mills", such as "textile mills"). Much of the early generation of electricity - which steadily replaced kerosene for lighting needs.
6) Wind. While wind's rise from niche power generation source to major electricity player may come to mind first, the wind-powered mills gave tremendous mechanical power to early industry in a number of parts of the world, as well as being used to pump water.
7) Geothermal. It's long been used where I'm at (Iceland) and other geothermal-rich locations, such as for baking, bathing or heating. In modern times it's a slow but steadily growing lesser player on the grid (with potential for massive expansion in the event that hot dry rock becomes more economical)
8) Solar. Solar power has been used by humanity since the early days for a number of industries, such as salt production and agriculture, although it's use to generate electricity is much newer. The rate of growth of solar production is an even sharper curve than wind was at its stage.
9) Nuclear. Strange that you didn't mention it, given how much of our grid it makes up. Nuclear fuels can supply the world's need for great lengths of time - increased by orders of magnitude with seawater recovery, and orders of magnitude more still with fusion.
I could keep going with wave, tidal, and other sources. But the reality is that humans have 1) used diverse sources of power throughout history to drive our advancement, and 2) if there's anything that's defined our use of power sources, it's that they change with time as our tech advances - and there's absolutely no reason to think that this is just going to stop.
Furthermore, I disagree with the basic premise of some sort of imminent shortage of fossil fuels. In case you haven't noticed, history has once again shown that when it comes to resources, they're not like some cup that you drink from until it suddenly runs out. Biological systems sometimes are, but not mineral resources. The easiest-to-get resources are rare, followed by somewhat harder to get ones that are an order of magnitude more common, followed by even harder ones at another order of magnitude increase in abundance, and so forth. One works through the easiest resources first and moves to the more difficult/more ones with an increase in price. However, combatting this price increase is the relentless advancement of technology, whose capability to advance increases further with each new source you move into. While spikes happen in the short term (and people always freak out about "running out", and always have), the long term average is generally steady to downward. Back to oil, remember all of those people freaking out about "peak oil" when we were nearing $150 a barrel? What happened? Bitumen and tight oil. Likewise for natural gas, what happened? Shale gas. Tech advanced (spurred on by the elevated prices), and these vastly abundant resources suddenly became not only competitive, but cheap. And there's no shortage of future hydrocarbon resources awaiting their time.
The fact is that the UK has been told they have to not only allow him his freedom, but have to also compensate him for the illegal detention they've put him under.
By a nonbinding body (WGAD) that rules in favour of almost all plaintiffs that come before it (usually unanimously, unlike in this case). Both the UK and Sweden have stated the WGAD ruling will have no bearing on the case at hand. Assange raised it in his most recent appeal with the Swedish courts (yet another in a long row of them). He lost.
The fact is that Sweden has and can interview him in the embassy, and were dragging their feet (read:political corruption).
Read: Ecuador is demanding that Sweden sign some sort of treaty - the exact details of which have not been publicly disclosed by either side - before they'll allow the prosecutors in, something that Sweden is against. This has been a stalemate for the past 16 months. Before that, Sweden had been insisting on the interview taking place in Sweden in order to follow the standard Swedish process, which is: 1) the initial investigatory phase is carried out, including any interviews 2) if the prosecutor believes charges to be likely and the subject will not voluntarily enter custody, the prosecutor recommends to a judge that the subject be formally anklagad (suspected of/charged with a crime); 3) the judge issues a warrant and the subject is brought into custody; 4) the subject is interviewed (for a second time, if there were interviews conducted in the initial phase), with every matter they are to be charged with put be put forth to them; 5) the subject is formally åtalad (charged/indicted); this begins a time limit on when the subject must be tried (although it can be extended if there are conditions that prevent the person from being tried immediately); and 6) the subject is tried (this cannot occur in absentia). As a general rule, while investigatory interviews are conducted anywhere, final interviews are conducted in Swedish custody, so that if the person is åtalad there is no risk that they could escape trial. This was the route sought by prosecutor Ny up until 2015, when - due to the shortage of time remaining on the lesser charges, and criticism from a lower court for her not seeking less conventional options to try to break the deadlock, Ny sought an interview in the Ecuadorian embassy. The deadlock on this latter issue remains to this day.
The anklagad/åtalad distinction has often been a stumbling ground in the english-speaking press because it doesn't directly map to stages in US or British legal systems, which generally only recognize one stage of charging, while Sweden has two (one to bring a subject into custody, and one to initiate a trial). However, there is significant jurisprudence that anklagad equates to being charged within the context of an EAW - whatever language one chooses to use for other contexts.
A general summary of peer-reviewed rankings of the Swedish legal system on different aspects can be found here, more detailed information about what the categories mean and how they're assessed here (extremely detailed here and here) , and more detailed information in general here.
I assume you actually mean Bob Beckel. Not only is he not Clinton's campaign manager, Snopes can't find any evidence that he's ever even worked as a Clinton strategist in any capacity. Maybe if you dig hard enough you might find some sort of "three degrees of separation" thing to damn her with, though, so you should probably get started.
What, you don't trust reporting that only traces back to "truepundit.com" and their anonymous "sources"? Come on, next you're going to tell me that I can't lose 10 pounds in two weeks by following this one weird trick.
No. Nothing has ever been "scrapped"; every court hearing (and there've been many), both in the UK and Sweden, at all levels (including the Supreme Courts of both countries), has gone against him. What did happen was that the statute of limitations on the lesser charges ran out. The statute of limitations on the rape charge doesn't run out until 2020.
Given that Julian already consented once to have the press conference on the balcony, we're entitled to have the press conference on the balcony, and if that means moving him outside while he sleeps, then so be it.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, except that economies of scale mean that things should be even easier for you than a simple linear scaling would suggest.
That's pretty weak. I mean, check out the link I gave, some of the roads you'll see haven't even had a single vehicle on them in 24 hours.
That's another thing. How absurd is it that fines for local violations like speeding and traffic cameras in the US go to those entities enforcing them? Could you design a worse conflict of interest if you tried? How can anyone think that such a system is appropriate?
Yes, they do. And since the government needs the information anyway (for your taxes), why shouldn't they just collect it in the first place? Why make you do it for them, and then have to randomly audit you if they think you're lying?
Note that you can add / remove / change information on your tax returns in Iceland if you think something is incorrect or lacking. But I've never found a reason to. I doubt the vast majority of people do either.
A bit of an aside, but I heard country music for the first time in about four years last weekend. And the reason for that was because I was in the US last weekend ;)
The banking system difference really gets me. Banks here don't even accept checks any more, they're considered antiquated technology. All banking systems are unified. Medical records systems are unified. Government records systems are unified. You know how I fill out my taxes? I go to a web page, log in, click "confirm" on several pages (because the information is almost invariably correct, as it's automatically collected), and click to submit. It takes about two minutes.
I agree, lots of major technologies are developed in the US, yet it seems peoples' everyday experiences are technologically backwards. It's a bit of a paradox.
1) You have a far higher population density (about 100x the land but about 1000x the population). That makes things easier. You're not located on an unstable volcanic rock with extreme weather conditions in the middle of the North Atlantic with little domestic production. Again, that makes it easier for you.
2) For more specifics, believe it or not, the Ring Road is not the only road in Iceland. There's 24-32 thousand kilometers of roads in Iceland (the exact number depends on how bad of roads you consider)
3) So are you saying that there is no such sensor network in the US? Why?
I don't understand the premise. Does the US not have roadside sensors already? For ages we've had roadside sensors here in Iceland:
Traffic counts and conditions (picked the northeast as an example)
Live webcams
Is there nothing like that in the US?
For a sense of comparison, Iceland has a total population similar to that of Anaheim, California.
Personally, I hate all of these "arguments through incredulity" that you encounter whenever it comes from energy, trying to argue that we can't expand fossil fuels fast enoigh, alternative fuels, solar power, wind power, nuclear power, you name it based on your ideology, fast enough to meet demand. It's always along the lines of "We'd have to build X units every Y days, and doesn't that numver sound impossibly large?"
Well, *everything* we do with energy is on unthinkably large scales. We spend a huge chunk of our entire planet's gdp, billions of man-years per year, on it. Arguments through incredulity gloss over this. When arguing against a given tech - as this article does with carbon capture - it's not enough to just act incredulous, you need to do a fibancial analysis (which on large scales is not trivial)
Also they do the "all or nothing" faælacy as well. It's perfectly acceptable ro pursue carbon capture at the same time as other technologies. More to the point, until one is sure that a particular solution is the be-all end-all in a particular field, it's only logical.
And 100% of democrats going for, 0% against.
I'm failing to see why you think that this makes Republicans look good.
There's no shortage of potential routes to cost reduction. It all comes down to funding. And the funding has to be stable, and not come with "mandates" - the two main things that have hindered NASA's work over the years.
Simultaneously attempt four or five "huge leap forward" technologies and you're likely to end up with one or two succeeding.
To be clear:
* The letter against SpaceX was signed by 10 people, all of them Republicans
* The letter supporting SpaceX was signed by 24 people: 11 Republicans and 13 Democrats
So I'm not sure how you're turning this into some commentary about Republican support for free markets, because honestly it looks like the opposite.
Ugh... "still lose", not "still loose".... that's one of my personal pet peeves, and now I made it myself (due to a typo, but still, that's no excuse!)
Except that not only are costs trends in the space industry not comparable to computers and smartphones... they don't even track with the general economy. NASA budgets based on the NNSI, the Nasa New Start Index. It's a higher inflation rate than common metrics like the CPI.
The reason for this is that common metrics are based on a grab-bag of consumer goods. Over time consumer goods have shifted from being hand-produced by domestic labour to mass produced in factories with cheap overseas labour. Meanwhile, however, rockets continue to involve large amounts of manual labour by highly trained individuals.
Nor does rocketry have some sort of amazing tech advance that's been driving it down. Fuels have changed little in recent decades. Engine efficiencies have drifted up and stage masses down, but there have been no spectacular leaps. Dreams of major leaps forward, such as the Shuttle, VentureStar, etc have played out poorly. That doesn't mean that they always will - it's just that the situation as it stands isn't rosy.
Don't get me wrong, I do think there's hope. One, companies like SpaceX that start from scratch and thus can apply "lessons learned" from scratch are at a big advantage, as well as not having to make hard decisions about what sort of legacy "baggage" is worth keeping around. Secondly, smart design approaches can help keep costs down. SpaceX, for example, manages to get some degree of mass production on its engines by using so many that are identical (or virtually identical, in the case of the vacuum versions with the extended nozzle) on every launch. And with the Heavy they'll step that up even more. The upper and lower stage cores are also very similar, and the boosters on the Heavy will also be very similar to the cores. So they get some degree of economies of scale, and a lot more unit testing on at least the engines (not as much with the cores, unfortunately, and that's come back to bite them - the downside to starting over is that it's a total reset on system reliability). From a technological standpoint, using new (by space industry standards) manufacturing techniques like friction stir welding, and balancing ground handling costs with rocket performance (aka, the "semi-balloon tank" design, where the rocket is strong enough to support itself unfilled but not strong enough to withstand launch forces without pressurant) also improve their cost performance. If someone - SpaceX or others - can mange to get cost effective stage reuse to work, then that would be another big boost. So there is hope.
But as far as the past decades have gone, comparing rocketry to computers and cell phones has been anything but an apt comparison.
I think a lot of people confuse the possibility of social mobility with the probability of social mobility.
Think of it like the difficulty setting on a game. Difficulty settings can range from the ridiculously easy to the virtually impossible. Likewise, different players have different skill levels in how good they are at the game. If the game had the same difficulty setting for everyone, comparing in-game scores/accomplishments/times would be an easy way to compare how good players are at the game.
But it's not that way, because you have difficulty settings. A person can be quite good at a game, but still loose because they choose to play it on a tough difficulty setting. Likewise, a person can really suck at a game but still win because they chose to play it on an easy setting. Now, there always will be some people who are so good that they'll win at the toughest settings and some people who are so bad that they'll still lose on the easiest settings. But lots of quite good players will still fail when the settings are hard enough, and lots of quite bad players will still succeed when it's easy.
We enter life with a variety of factors that influence our "difficulty settings" that we all have to play on. A white cis straight man with wealthy, college-educated parents raised in a good household is probably going to be playing on "easy". A poor black gay or trans woman with poor, high-school-educated parents raised in a bad environment, with no healthcare, loaded in debt from day one, having to work to support their family, limited transportation options, etc? Not so much. Will some of the former fail, and some of the latter succeed? Of course! But the odds of it are skewed. Many if not most people who would have been quite successful had they been on a level playing field will fail, and vice versa.
I, for one, support giving everyone access to the easier difficulty settings. I don't think it's a good thing for an economy when you have potential talent not being realized and people who really should be working a cash register in management. More to the point, the cost to the economy is almost unfathomably large. So if it takes some money to make this happen? So be it. Social mobility isn't just about the technical possibility of moving from one economic reality to another; it's about the practical reality of it, and how much merit and ability are able to overcome social inertia for the majority of players in the system.
Meanwhile, 24 members of congress wrote a counter-letter :)
No, in 28 flights, and this would have been 29. You don't define a failure rate by "what is the narrowest bounds that I can choose that will give the worst-sounding number"?
Several percent failure is normal for rocketry (different figures are cited depending on how you measure, often 95%, although IMHO that's too pessimistic for modern rocketry). SpaceX was running 96,4% before this failure, although that's obviously biased upwards by measuring immediately before failure. They're now 93,1%, although that's conversly biased downward by measuring immediately after a failure. For a company that has designed the rocket almost from scratch rather than relying on legacy, proven technology, that isn't in the slightest a bad record. Furthermore, the CRS-7 failure wasn't their fault (except to the extent that they actually trusted that manufacturer certifications are worth the paper they're printed on), and in this case, the jury is still out as to how much responsibility they actually bear for the failure (even ignoring the whole "sabotage" angle, they don't make the COPVs - and you can't test every COPV to find its fatigue/stress/thermal cycling limit because if you do, well, it's destroyed; they don't fail gracefully, so the best you can do is a statistical sampling of them (which they'd already at least been doing with the struts, which turned out to not be good enough)).
And I think "crash" really is the operative word. Look at the Hoba meteorite. This was a natural object, not something shaped by man to be some sort of optimal entry shape or set on some optimal entry trajectory. Yet it lost only a fraction of its mass during entry and landed intact on the surface. We absolutely can do that and better. Forget trying to "land" mined asteroid material with a spacecraft - it only needs to be shaped, sintered, and ejected onto a proper intercept trajectory. Nature has already demonstrated for us that this technique works. As if it'd be hard to find some place willing to donate up land for the landing ellipse in exchange for a cut of the profits (land that could still be farmed / grazed / etc, so long as people are away when returns are expected), whether it be asian steppes, Saharan desert, Canadian tundra, etc.
You yourself just named two energy sources (hardly the only ones we use). Let's add some more.
1) Wood fire. Which not just increased safety, health, and comfort, but ultimately led to primitive metallurgy, allowing first for the bronze age, then with later improvements the iron age.
2) Animal power. Domestication of animals and the use of their muscle power for human needs led to a vast increase in the ability to transport goods and people, farm the land, and operate early "industry" (such as oxen yoked to a mill)
3) Fats. Early lighting, and in some cases heating needs often revolved the combustion of fats and waxes. Initially plant and animal fat sources dominated; marine sources ("whale oil") later became more popular.
4) Kerosene. Used as a light and sometimes heat source; it steadily replaced fats for this purpose. Technically "oil", but was used very differently.
5) Water. Early on mills were used to grind grain, and later to run early industries (often still called "mills", such as "textile mills"). Much of the early generation of electricity - which steadily replaced kerosene for lighting needs.
6) Wind. While wind's rise from niche power generation source to major electricity player may come to mind first, the wind-powered mills gave tremendous mechanical power to early industry in a number of parts of the world, as well as being used to pump water.
7) Geothermal. It's long been used where I'm at (Iceland) and other geothermal-rich locations, such as for baking, bathing or heating. In modern times it's a slow but steadily growing lesser player on the grid (with potential for massive expansion in the event that hot dry rock becomes more economical)
8) Solar. Solar power has been used by humanity since the early days for a number of industries, such as salt production and agriculture, although it's use to generate electricity is much newer. The rate of growth of solar production is an even sharper curve than wind was at its stage.
9) Nuclear. Strange that you didn't mention it, given how much of our grid it makes up. Nuclear fuels can supply the world's need for great lengths of time - increased by orders of magnitude with seawater recovery, and orders of magnitude more still with fusion.
I could keep going with wave, tidal, and other sources. But the reality is that humans have 1) used diverse sources of power throughout history to drive our advancement, and 2) if there's anything that's defined our use of power sources, it's that they change with time as our tech advances - and there's absolutely no reason to think that this is just going to stop.
Furthermore, I disagree with the basic premise of some sort of imminent shortage of fossil fuels. In case you haven't noticed, history has once again shown that when it comes to resources, they're not like some cup that you drink from until it suddenly runs out. Biological systems sometimes are, but not mineral resources. The easiest-to-get resources are rare, followed by somewhat harder to get ones that are an order of magnitude more common, followed by even harder ones at another order of magnitude increase in abundance, and so forth. One works through the easiest resources first and moves to the more difficult/more ones with an increase in price. However, combatting this price increase is the relentless advancement of technology, whose capability to advance increases further with each new source you move into. While spikes happen in the short term (and people always freak out about "running out", and always have), the long term average is generally steady to downward. Back to oil, remember all of those people freaking out about "peak oil" when we were nearing $150 a barrel? What happened? Bitumen and tight oil. Likewise for natural gas, what happened? Shale gas. Tech advanced (spurred on by the elevated prices), and these vastly abundant resources suddenly became not only competitive, but cheap. And there's no shortage of future hydrocarbon resources awaiting their time.
Right. Based on a report from "True Pundit", which has about the reputability of a geocities page.
Ack, posted too soon... that was supposed to read significant precedent, not jurisprudence. :P Oh well...
By a nonbinding body (WGAD) that rules in favour of almost all plaintiffs that come before it (usually unanimously, unlike in this case). Both the UK and Sweden have stated the WGAD ruling will have no bearing on the case at hand. Assange raised it in his most recent appeal with the Swedish courts (yet another in a long row of them). He lost.
Read: Ecuador is demanding that Sweden sign some sort of treaty - the exact details of which have not been publicly disclosed by either side - before they'll allow the prosecutors in, something that Sweden is against. This has been a stalemate for the past 16 months. Before that, Sweden had been insisting on the interview taking place in Sweden in order to follow the standard Swedish process, which is: 1) the initial investigatory phase is carried out, including any interviews 2) if the prosecutor believes charges to be likely and the subject will not voluntarily enter custody, the prosecutor recommends to a judge that the subject be formally anklagad (suspected of/charged with a crime); 3) the judge issues a warrant and the subject is brought into custody; 4) the subject is interviewed (for a second time, if there were interviews conducted in the initial phase), with every matter they are to be charged with put be put forth to them; 5) the subject is formally åtalad (charged/indicted); this begins a time limit on when the subject must be tried (although it can be extended if there are conditions that prevent the person from being tried immediately); and 6) the subject is tried (this cannot occur in absentia). As a general rule, while investigatory interviews are conducted anywhere, final interviews are conducted in Swedish custody, so that if the person is åtalad there is no risk that they could escape trial. This was the route sought by prosecutor Ny up until 2015, when - due to the shortage of time remaining on the lesser charges, and criticism from a lower court for her not seeking less conventional options to try to break the deadlock, Ny sought an interview in the Ecuadorian embassy. The deadlock on this latter issue remains to this day.
The anklagad/åtalad distinction has often been a stumbling ground in the english-speaking press because it doesn't directly map to stages in US or British legal systems, which generally only recognize one stage of charging, while Sweden has two (one to bring a subject into custody, and one to initiate a trial). However, there is significant jurisprudence that anklagad equates to being charged within the context of an EAW - whatever language one chooses to use for other contexts.
A general summary of peer-reviewed rankings of the Swedish legal system on different aspects can be found here, more detailed information about what the categories mean and how they're assessed here (extremely detailed here and here) , and more detailed information in general here.
What has Robby Mook said about Assange?
I assume you actually mean Bob Beckel. Not only is he not Clinton's campaign manager, Snopes can't find any evidence that he's ever even worked as a Clinton strategist in any capacity. Maybe if you dig hard enough you might find some sort of "three degrees of separation" thing to damn her with, though, so you should probably get started.
What, you don't trust reporting that only traces back to "truepundit.com" and their anonymous "sources"? Come on, next you're going to tell me that I can't lose 10 pounds in two weeks by following this one weird trick.
No. Nothing has ever been "scrapped"; every court hearing (and there've been many), both in the UK and Sweden, at all levels (including the Supreme Courts of both countries), has gone against him. What did happen was that the statute of limitations on the lesser charges ran out. The statute of limitations on the rape charge doesn't run out until 2020.
Given that Julian already consented once to have the press conference on the balcony, we're entitled to have the press conference on the balcony, and if that means moving him outside while he sleeps, then so be it.