The difference between "some copyright" and "what we have right now and direction in which we are headed" is similar to "USA" and "China" in terms of individual political freedom.
Are you suggesting that UN is LESS neutral then USA, or are you laughing at your attempt to strawman the argument by pretending he said "neutral" in absolute terms?
Because they are a different country with different culture and values.
This bubble in which some people live in never ceases to amaze me. The sheer foolishness of belief that their values are by far the best for everyone, and shared by everyone is beyond stupid and turning on your TV to watch the news debunks it time and time again. Yet they believe...
All vaccines have complications. In fact, breathing air has complications. As does digesting food.
The issue is that vaccinations have a low risk (usually a few people out of million suffering any significant harm) and save us from diseases that used to wipe out roughly half of children before they reached adulthood. That's one in two for mathematically challenged, pretty good numbers against single digit number in a million.
Life itself is risk management. When you do not vaccinate your children, you expose them to a massive risk, and eliminate an exceptionally small one. In addition, you also expose others around you to significant risk as well. I am very interested in seeing what will happen when some sue-happy parent of a child with one of various forms of diseases that impact their immune systems making them impossible to be vaccinated will contract a disease against which most are vaccinated, gets killed by it, find out who in their neighborhood isn't vaccinated and then sue that person(s) for involuntary manslaughter.
Scientifically speaking they would have a very decent case. Add to that the horrible pictures of how the child died, alongside a shitload of graphs showing how children used to die in the similar way in huge numbers just a couple of generations ago, followed by "well you don't see that anymore because of vaccines, but this asshole here [point finger at accused] decided that my darling daughter's life isn't worth anything".
Your average working mom sitting in the jury will eat that argument up and try to lock the poor bastard(s) away for life. Then check on her children's vaccinations just in case.
1. Far better graphics (1080p at 6x anti-aliasing on my machine without a hitch) 2. Save states (save anywhere within the game) 3. Far superior load speeds.
PS1 games have had a functional emulator that has same advantages for ages.
Funnily, I've recently started picking up PS2 JRPGs I always wanted to play. You know, ones that are less then decade old. The PS2 emulators on PC are getting to the point where games play really well.
Doesn't really fit into your world of raging, but do go on.
1. We do not recycle our fuel at all. 2. We only use uranium, and only the one we are currently mining.
As usual, devil is in the details. The reason why we're not reprocessing is two-fold. One is fear of profiliteration. The other is price. Uranium is dirt cheap right now, even with price having gone up several times over last decade. It's simply not economically feasible to prospect for new uranium deposits or recycle.
As a result, even worst-case REALISTIC scenarios featuring uranium-only future are over two hundred years. Recycling fuel essentially adds about 5-10 times more fuel then we have now (depending on technique used and how many times we're willing to run it through recycling). Prospecting is likely to add at least a thousand years if not more - we have almost no uranium prospecting done (in comparison to more used metals like nickel or copper for example) and we actually know that there is often refinable uranium in already existing mines, that is currently dumped in purification process as a cheap, useless byproduct.
And when you actually add thorium to the picture, even if we have entire world on electric cars and driving as much as people of USA do right now, and even if our energy needs keep increasing in addition to that, we're bound to last several thousands of years on those alone with occasional biomass and coal/fossil fuel plant running where nuclear makes no sense (which after the russians made the floating version of plants shrunk significantly). France makes a great example of a modern industrialized country that chose to supply most of its base electricity needs with nuclear, and it works quite well.
And finally, there is fusion. We're bound to get the damn thing to work in a few hundreds of years, and that is near-infinite source of energy considering the amount of fuel we have in our oceans.
This is a bit of doomsaying more then anything else. Burning technologies (for large plants, talking around 200MW per boiler) have really advanced with modern automation. Did you know that one of the biggest annoyances when burning things, SO2 has been largely eliminated in most modern plants that burn... pretty much anything by extreme control over the burning process? In other words, you don't even need complex filters on those anymore, the advances in the burning process itself due to computerization have made processes much less harmful to environment. This is why we talk so much about CO2 and so little about other products of burners - when we used to talk about those other products all the time before. Because the new plant technologies have virtually eliminated most of those, and those that remain are usually rendered harmless by solidifying them on the plant and not allowing them to spread into environment.
Add to this the fact that we can in fact burn what we grow (biomass), then consider that nuclear is pretty efficient and safe and we have enough uranium and thorium for at least a millenium... we're not so fucked anymore. At least as long as we can develop fusion into workable system in a few hundred years. The only real problem that remains is upgrading the existing burner plants before they shit all over the environment with really toxic stuff (which is what is happening in China at the moment) as well as upgrading nuclear to more efficient and safe plants.
Wind turbines are mostly built in the West. This isn't simple tech to build, and even a small deviation from norm may cause much harsher wear and tear. Incidentally, most of the costs of wind turbines aren't in making them but MAINTAINING them. As a result, skimping on manufacturing costs at the cost of increased maintenance makes no financial sense.
This is exact opposite of most consumer products, where we largely gave up on maintenance because it's more costly then buying a new, made in [poor country on slave wage] product.
"Reliable as cable" in terms of everyday use. Example: wireless keyboard. As long as it works as reliably as a cable from end-user's point of view, it will remain a popular and as you put it, convenient choice. It wouldn't be more convenient if it was noticeably less reliable, i.e. failed in average usage.
Which it will likely start to do once its spectrum starts to get really noisy. We're not there yet, but we're fast heading in that direction. Currently the main source of failures are silly "same type of keyboard in the same room" moments, which average user can understand. When it will get to the point where pretty much any piece of random hardware will disrupt other hardware, inconvenience threshold will likely be crossed even for an average user.
That "wireless future" is running into wall of congestion very, very fast. Which is the entire point of the article.
You have to remember, the basic premise of wireless is that it's as reliable as cable. When congestion hits, it won't be anymore. Which will bring cable as a vastly superior solution.
I can vouch that #2 will give you the money if you can convince them that you're not a fraud, for a reason of having observed one do everything to win favor of crappy populist organizations like Greenpeace through buying their local activists dinners to attend their seminars on how less polluting the new coal plants are. Insider info here.
Fact is, big corporations want to make money in the future in addition to now, and that means cleaning the dirty image that is in the people's (and politicians' who decide on new building permits) minds right now. So if you can do a reliable study that global warming isn't man made, then coal industry will be able to reliably shrink it to a small fraction of the current one, and still make the same profits.
We're talking pretty damn big figures here, all up for grabs. Perhaps the fact that no one has yet succeeded in taking that money is one of the best capitalist-style pieces of proof that it really is likely man-made. Because greed really does motivate people.
Ars technica did no benchmarking of its own. It just seems to quote anandtech all over the article without going in depth.
It's what you call a smear job, you cherry pick the worst parts and a few averages, present averages as peaks and worst parts as averages. Picture of bulldozer on fire at the head of article pretty much sums the article itself.
Essentially EVERY SINGLE ONE of soft drinks companies sell bottled water. Bottled water is basically a soft drink minus the syrup, that has better mark up.
What most likely really happened is a couple of people who actually understand how marketing works sat together and discussed if they want to have more borderline false marketing with bottled water.
You see, bottled water is one of the biggest scams in the history of the world. It's sold on image they market. The actual product is in most cases worse then standard tap water. So giving them yet anther marketing tool is most definitely not in the interest of less smart EU citizens. Sometimes you have to protect the weak from the scammers in silly ways like these. And yes, I know that this idea will fly in the face of everything american according to some, as its an american thing to exploit those who are less smart then you for money. But this is EU, so get off our lawn.
The extremely obvious problem would be that many important and expensive components of the turbines last about 12-15 years. Which means that if they give you warranty for 30, they also charge you for 30.
Or they charge you for about 5, and charge your government for 25 in subsidies. Which is what actually happens.
And on your last question: yes, but not in the scope you mention. You effectively strawmanned the argument - no one said they fail RANDOMLY. What was said is that they fail QUICKLY - too quickly to ever break even right now, which is why they are heavily subsidized. Now, this isn't bad per se - this is relatively new technology and most new technologies need subsidies to get off their feet. Problem is, it's being rolled out in full... when it's glaringly obviously not ready. And coal and gas plant builders absolutely love wind to death and another dirty secret is that coal and gas lobby lobbies for wind. Because it isn't their competitor - it's their best friend. All wind power will be backed up by coal or gas or similar. At the same time, it shafts their real competitor, nuclear on PR front.
Anyway, most wind turbine failures are fairly predictable, as those are mechanical failures. We have a lot of history and science on how to predict those.
Flowing water turbine is the extension of the idea we had before we learned laws of physics enough to support dams instead of them. It's the idea that you should just feed turbine off flowing river, instead of damming it.
Now, tell me why is it we spend so much resources damming up river. Specifically, reasons that are glaringly obvious in laws of physics.
There was a news case here in Finland a few months ago where they interviewed a woman suffering from a very rare strain, which is why I remember it. So they gave her the really nasty antibiotics, she went on dialysis after a few days as her kidneys started to fail, and before week was out she made a decision with her doctor that she will stop taking antibiotics because if she did, she would likely spend the rest of her life on dialysis machine or even die. She survived the infection, was it because antibiotics killed enough of it or because her immune system could have handled it without the drugs, we'll never know. They said she had to take medication for the rest of her life and limit her diet because of extensive kidney damage and she apparently has to go to hospital for dialysis on regular basis.
So at least here, it appeared that the choice what to do was made by both doctor and a patient in consensus after they consulted each other. I imagine if you're unconscious or otherwise mentally disabled/diminished, doctor wouldn't obviously consult the patient and instead make best possible decisions based on his/her judgment. Perhaps it's a different medical culture here, or a different culture in general - in Nordic countries we generally try to go for consensus on important issues as a wide cultural preference whenever possible.
I also love your "flowing water turbines" (unless you're talking about turbans, in which case I'm sorry). Do you even understand WHY we erect huge dams instead of just tapping the flowing river? Are you really that ignorant of laws of physics?
Just because you say so doesn't make it so. Because just a few weeks ago, english edition of Spiegel ran a nice article on these new German offshore wind farms. Latest tech, those things. Google for it.
Still, same mechanical problems because stuff just doesn't last under that stress. Materials aren't strong enough. Same problems with ridiculous maintenance requirements. Still same problems with not functioning all the time due to both too strong and too weak winds. Etc.
Thing is, most of the stuff that's "more strong" isn't really "new" per se. It's just that it's so harmful to human body, that it wasn't advised to ever really give it before, because the less nasty antibiotics worked on pretty much everything that more common ones couldn't get.
So nowadays there are cases where doctor/patient literally has to decide, do they risk letting the infection take its course, or do they kill the infection but also kill patient's kidneys/liver alongside the infection.
Looks like this particular comment and its moderation proves the point made by OP about utter ignorance of even fairly intelligent members of the public about the important details of the problem.
The problem with "last line" drugs is that they cannot really be given to many. They tend to cause things like complete kidney and liver failures you see. As a result, their profitability is quite shit due to small volumes - these drugs are literally something you only give when you see that patient will likely die. Also these antibiotics aren't "new", most of them have been known for a long time. They just weren't given because side effects were utterly devastating to human organs responsible for cleaning toxins out of the bloodstream.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference between "some copyright" and "what we have right now and direction in which we are headed" is similar to "USA" and "China" in terms of individual political freedom.
Are you suggesting that UN is LESS neutral then USA, or are you laughing at your attempt to strawman the argument by pretending he said "neutral" in absolute terms?
Because they are a different country with different culture and values.
This bubble in which some people live in never ceases to amaze me. The sheer foolishness of belief that their values are by far the best for everyone, and shared by everyone is beyond stupid and turning on your TV to watch the news debunks it time and time again. Yet they believe...
All vaccines have complications. In fact, breathing air has complications. As does digesting food.
The issue is that vaccinations have a low risk (usually a few people out of million suffering any significant harm) and save us from diseases that used to wipe out roughly half of children before they reached adulthood. That's one in two for mathematically challenged, pretty good numbers against single digit number in a million.
Life itself is risk management. When you do not vaccinate your children, you expose them to a massive risk, and eliminate an exceptionally small one. In addition, you also expose others around you to significant risk as well. I am very interested in seeing what will happen when some sue-happy parent of a child with one of various forms of diseases that impact their immune systems making them impossible to be vaccinated will contract a disease against which most are vaccinated, gets killed by it, find out who in their neighborhood isn't vaccinated and then sue that person(s) for involuntary manslaughter.
Scientifically speaking they would have a very decent case. Add to that the horrible pictures of how the child died, alongside a shitload of graphs showing how children used to die in the similar way in huge numbers just a couple of generations ago, followed by "well you don't see that anymore because of vaccines, but this asshole here [point finger at accused] decided that my darling daughter's life isn't worth anything".
Your average working mom sitting in the jury will eat that argument up and try to lock the poor bastard(s) away for life. Then check on her children's vaccinations just in case.
God CREATED sickness just like he created everything else in the world.
Remember the whole "you must suffer on this mortal plane so you can be rewarded in afterlife"? It's the central theme of christianity.
1. Far better graphics (1080p at 6x anti-aliasing on my machine without a hitch)
2. Save states (save anywhere within the game)
3. Far superior load speeds.
PS1 games have had a functional emulator that has same advantages for ages.
Funnily, I've recently started picking up PS2 JRPGs I always wanted to play. You know, ones that are less then decade old. The PS2 emulators on PC are getting to the point where games play really well.
Doesn't really fit into your world of raging, but do go on.
The number comes from two major assumptions:
1. We do not recycle our fuel at all.
2. We only use uranium, and only the one we are currently mining.
As usual, devil is in the details. The reason why we're not reprocessing is two-fold. One is fear of profiliteration. The other is price. Uranium is dirt cheap right now, even with price having gone up several times over last decade. It's simply not economically feasible to prospect for new uranium deposits or recycle.
As a result, even worst-case REALISTIC scenarios featuring uranium-only future are over two hundred years. Recycling fuel essentially adds about 5-10 times more fuel then we have now (depending on technique used and how many times we're willing to run it through recycling). Prospecting is likely to add at least a thousand years if not more - we have almost no uranium prospecting done (in comparison to more used metals like nickel or copper for example) and we actually know that there is often refinable uranium in already existing mines, that is currently dumped in purification process as a cheap, useless byproduct.
And when you actually add thorium to the picture, even if we have entire world on electric cars and driving as much as people of USA do right now, and even if our energy needs keep increasing in addition to that, we're bound to last several thousands of years on those alone with occasional biomass and coal/fossil fuel plant running where nuclear makes no sense (which after the russians made the floating version of plants shrunk significantly). France makes a great example of a modern industrialized country that chose to supply most of its base electricity needs with nuclear, and it works quite well.
And finally, there is fusion. We're bound to get the damn thing to work in a few hundreds of years, and that is near-infinite source of energy considering the amount of fuel we have in our oceans.
^^^ Quite possibly the most insightful comment of the day. Many people really underestimate the whole "honeymoon is over" part of the relationship.
This is a bit of doomsaying more then anything else. Burning technologies (for large plants, talking around 200MW per boiler) have really advanced with modern automation. Did you know that one of the biggest annoyances when burning things, SO2 has been largely eliminated in most modern plants that burn... pretty much anything by extreme control over the burning process? In other words, you don't even need complex filters on those anymore, the advances in the burning process itself due to computerization have made processes much less harmful to environment. This is why we talk so much about CO2 and so little about other products of burners - when we used to talk about those other products all the time before. Because the new plant technologies have virtually eliminated most of those, and those that remain are usually rendered harmless by solidifying them on the plant and not allowing them to spread into environment.
Add to this the fact that we can in fact burn what we grow (biomass), then consider that nuclear is pretty efficient and safe and we have enough uranium and thorium for at least a millenium... we're not so fucked anymore. At least as long as we can develop fusion into workable system in a few hundred years. The only real problem that remains is upgrading the existing burner plants before they shit all over the environment with really toxic stuff (which is what is happening in China at the moment) as well as upgrading nuclear to more efficient and safe plants.
Wind turbines are mostly built in the West. This isn't simple tech to build, and even a small deviation from norm may cause much harsher wear and tear. Incidentally, most of the costs of wind turbines aren't in making them but MAINTAINING them. As a result, skimping on manufacturing costs at the cost of increased maintenance makes no financial sense.
This is exact opposite of most consumer products, where we largely gave up on maintenance because it's more costly then buying a new, made in [poor country on slave wage] product.
"Reliable as cable" in terms of everyday use. Example: wireless keyboard. As long as it works as reliably as a cable from end-user's point of view, it will remain a popular and as you put it, convenient choice. It wouldn't be more convenient if it was noticeably less reliable, i.e. failed in average usage.
Which it will likely start to do once its spectrum starts to get really noisy. We're not there yet, but we're fast heading in that direction. Currently the main source of failures are silly "same type of keyboard in the same room" moments, which average user can understand. When it will get to the point where pretty much any piece of random hardware will disrupt other hardware, inconvenience threshold will likely be crossed even for an average user.
You're talking about different frequency range. FM radio is not congested because it's very strictly regulated.
That "wireless future" is running into wall of congestion very, very fast. Which is the entire point of the article.
You have to remember, the basic premise of wireless is that it's as reliable as cable. When congestion hits, it won't be anymore. Which will bring cable as a vastly superior solution.
Start to inquire with the following:
1. Coal plant operators
2. Coal plant builders
3. Coal mining corps
I can vouch that #2 will give you the money if you can convince them that you're not a fraud, for a reason of having observed one do everything to win favor of crappy populist organizations like Greenpeace through buying their local activists dinners to attend their seminars on how less polluting the new coal plants are. Insider info here.
Fact is, big corporations want to make money in the future in addition to now, and that means cleaning the dirty image that is in the people's (and politicians' who decide on new building permits) minds right now. So if you can do a reliable study that global warming isn't man made, then coal industry will be able to reliably shrink it to a small fraction of the current one, and still make the same profits.
We're talking pretty damn big figures here, all up for grabs. Perhaps the fact that no one has yet succeeded in taking that money is one of the best capitalist-style pieces of proof that it really is likely man-made. Because greed really does motivate people.
Ars technica did no benchmarking of its own. It just seems to quote anandtech all over the article without going in depth.
It's what you call a smear job, you cherry pick the worst parts and a few averages, present averages as peaks and worst parts as averages. Picture of bulldozer on fire at the head of article pretty much sums the article itself.
Essentially EVERY SINGLE ONE of soft drinks companies sell bottled water. Bottled water is basically a soft drink minus the syrup, that has better mark up.
What most likely really happened is a couple of people who actually understand how marketing works sat together and discussed if they want to have more borderline false marketing with bottled water.
You see, bottled water is one of the biggest scams in the history of the world. It's sold on image they market. The actual product is in most cases worse then standard tap water. So giving them yet anther marketing tool is most definitely not in the interest of less smart EU citizens. Sometimes you have to protect the weak from the scammers in silly ways like these. And yes, I know that this idea will fly in the face of everything american according to some, as its an american thing to exploit those who are less smart then you for money. But this is EU, so get off our lawn.
Consider it a cultural thing.
The extremely obvious problem would be that many important and expensive components of the turbines last about 12-15 years. Which means that if they give you warranty for 30, they also charge you for 30.
Or they charge you for about 5, and charge your government for 25 in subsidies. Which is what actually happens.
And on your last question: yes, but not in the scope you mention. You effectively strawmanned the argument - no one said they fail RANDOMLY. What was said is that they fail QUICKLY - too quickly to ever break even right now, which is why they are heavily subsidized. Now, this isn't bad per se - this is relatively new technology and most new technologies need subsidies to get off their feet. Problem is, it's being rolled out in full... when it's glaringly obviously not ready. And coal and gas plant builders absolutely love wind to death and another dirty secret is that coal and gas lobby lobbies for wind. Because it isn't their competitor - it's their best friend. All wind power will be backed up by coal or gas or similar. At the same time, it shafts their real competitor, nuclear on PR front.
Anyway, most wind turbine failures are fairly predictable, as those are mechanical failures. We have a lot of history and science on how to predict those.
Flowing water turbine is the extension of the idea we had before we learned laws of physics enough to support dams instead of them. It's the idea that you should just feed turbine off flowing river, instead of damming it.
Now, tell me why is it we spend so much resources damming up river. Specifically, reasons that are glaringly obvious in laws of physics.
There was a news case here in Finland a few months ago where they interviewed a woman suffering from a very rare strain, which is why I remember it. So they gave her the really nasty antibiotics, she went on dialysis after a few days as her kidneys started to fail, and before week was out she made a decision with her doctor that she will stop taking antibiotics because if she did, she would likely spend the rest of her life on dialysis machine or even die.
She survived the infection, was it because antibiotics killed enough of it or because her immune system could have handled it without the drugs, we'll never know. They said she had to take medication for the rest of her life and limit her diet because of extensive kidney damage and she apparently has to go to hospital for dialysis on regular basis.
So at least here, it appeared that the choice what to do was made by both doctor and a patient in consensus after they consulted each other. I imagine if you're unconscious or otherwise mentally disabled/diminished, doctor wouldn't obviously consult the patient and instead make best possible decisions based on his/her judgment. Perhaps it's a different medical culture here, or a different culture in general - in Nordic countries we generally try to go for consensus on important issues as a wide cultural preference whenever possible.
I also love your "flowing water turbines" (unless you're talking about turbans, in which case I'm sorry). Do you even understand WHY we erect huge dams instead of just tapping the flowing river? Are you really that ignorant of laws of physics?
Just because you say so doesn't make it so. Because just a few weeks ago, english edition of Spiegel ran a nice article on these new German offshore wind farms. Latest tech, those things. Google for it.
Still, same mechanical problems because stuff just doesn't last under that stress. Materials aren't strong enough. Same problems with ridiculous maintenance requirements. Still same problems with not functioning all the time due to both too strong and too weak winds. Etc.
Thing is, most of the stuff that's "more strong" isn't really "new" per se. It's just that it's so harmful to human body, that it wasn't advised to ever really give it before, because the less nasty antibiotics worked on pretty much everything that more common ones couldn't get.
So nowadays there are cases where doctor/patient literally has to decide, do they risk letting the infection take its course, or do they kill the infection but also kill patient's kidneys/liver alongside the infection.
"Viruses react to antibiotics" +4 informative.
Looks like this particular comment and its moderation proves the point made by OP about utter ignorance of even fairly intelligent members of the public about the important details of the problem.
The problem with "last line" drugs is that they cannot really be given to many. They tend to cause things like complete kidney and liver failures you see. As a result, their profitability is quite shit due to small volumes - these drugs are literally something you only give when you see that patient will likely die. Also these antibiotics aren't "new", most of them have been known for a long time. They just weren't given because side effects were utterly devastating to human organs responsible for cleaning toxins out of the bloodstream.