The thing about genetic variation is that there's a minimum set you need to live and extras which make it easier to survive if conditions change (as well as others which may well be negative, such as ones which predispose the carrier to nasty cancers after the reproductive period ends)
Just because you can live without them _now_ is not evidence they may not be useful later.
"Germany has 23 gigawatts of domestic solar panels, which, on a sunny day, is" NOT "sufficient to power the whole country."
There, FTFY
Germany imports a lot of nuclear power from France and having shut down its nukes now rates amongst the highest carbon emissions in the EU thanks to wholseale burning of brown coal.
The average German power draw is around 60GW, not 23. Even on a good day they need other sources. Peak is well over 80 and that happens when wind and solar tend to be at their lowest output.
In high flow, high rainfall, heavily mountainous areas like CR, the benefits far outweigh the environmental damage - and in most cases there aren't heavily populated areas downstream if there's a damburst.
In other areas, it's the other way around.
Large shallow hydro lakes are a potent methane source.
Those "no notice" raids are fairly meticulously planned for several weeks beforehand and the units responsible repeatedly train through scenarios. They also assemble, check the surroundings and get into place before beginning the raid.
The number of shots fired in such raids averages zero. That's the target and deviating from it results in hundreds of pages of paperwork explaining why someone felt it necessary to pull a trigger.
"There clearly is because the whole concept of SWATing doesn't seem to have made it to Europe. "
European police believe in checking the area first. Going in "guns blazing" on an anonymous emergency call without validating the situation would result in serious criminal charges.
Apart from that there's the other issue I mentioned above - police have been lured into ambushes by such calls.
Unlike the USA, Europe _has_ had fascists on the streets in living memory and a long history of abuse of human rights in various countries right up to the very recent past. It's one of the reasons the freedoms europeans now have are never taken for granted.
"If you were a cop and you were sent to an address in response to a 911 call claiming that there was someone at that address with a dangerous weapon, would you walk up to the door and knock politely?"
SOP in this country is to arrive dark and scout the property/surroundings FIRST - and that's specifically because terrorists have used such calls to lure teams of police into ambushes.
Going in with lights+sirens and being blown sky-high is exactly what a domestic terrorist would love to see.
> To be fair, when have you seen a news report where a friend or neighbor said, 'Yeah, he was a dangerous nut job that should have been locked up years ago. it's a shame that the SWAT team didn't just kill him and save the state the trial cost'.
Yes I have, usually followed by a shitstorm targetting the media for broadcastng it - even if they were in the right and the nut was well semaphored in advance.
"19 is an adult. Blaming parents for the actions of a grown man is just pathetic"
There are a number of such twits around. There's even a name for them: "Sociopaths"
The Internet makes it easier to pull this kind of thing and not get caught. Dumb sociopaths with a sadistic streak (most don't have this) take advantage of this.
Sociopaths are also good at manipulating those around them - most would never suspect that XYZ is one, and quite often XYZ has no clue he (usually he) is either.
"Spying on another country has always been "illegal" in the country that is the target."
The vast majority of "spying" is done in the reading room of public libraries, reading local newspapers and the vast majority of "spies" spend their entire lives reading such things.
When it's illegal to read the local papers, let me know. It's how you gather that intelligence into a whole which matters. (The UK's intercepts of enigma crypts gathered far more information from the movements of personnell than from the actual orders in the messages, as one example)
There are two sides to the coin. All those loopholes and exemptions make the tax gathering system inefficient.
By simplifying the tax system, goverments can lower taxation rates whilst increasing their net take, due to lower compliance costs.
Fantasy? No: It's been done. http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/ta... - The Taxation system in New Zealand is one of the most efficient in the world.
It takes a strong govt with the necessary cojones to NOT give in to vested interests. New Zealand in 1984 was in an unusual position in that the incoming govt went in on a massive landslide and the previous decade's worth of vote-buying policies had effectively bankrupted the country, so the govt was able to undertake drastic reforms.
> A free market wasn't "forced" on you. Read some history. That's the way this country started.
The modern Free Market is a lot better for the overall economy than mercantilism policies of the past - which were proven to concentrate wealth and power into a few hands over a 250 year period
Free Market - means free and fair competition, not freedom from regulation.
By the way, the REAL reason for the Boston Tea party was a removal of import taxes. Smugglers bringing untaxed tea into the colonies had been making out like bandits and had large stockpiles of the contraband onhand when the import tax was suddenly removed, leaving them with the prospect of selling at a substantial loss. What was thrown in the harbour was the first shipment of legal _untaxed_ tea and it was done in order to protect the smugglers' livlihoods.
It's arguably one of the first examples of unfair market manipulation by traders and Americans celebrate it like it was a good thing.
The Free Market can only be created and maintained by govt.
Mercantilism policies of the 18th to early-20th centuries clearly show that in the absence of govt intervention, the market tends towards abusive monopolies which are anything BUT free.
The biggest problem in the USA's "free market" economy over the last 30 years has been lack of intervention to keep it free. As a result the market is inevitably moving back to mercantilism.
That route would happen to be the pan-american highway which was there before the monument was discovered by anyone outside the local area (it was the road's existence which led to the discovery. Locals of course not only knew of the monument but had been maintaining it for centuries)
Rerouting the highway has been mooted on a number of occasions but between the issue that there's not much else practically available and the fact that the road already exists and making a new one would cause more damage elsewhere, it's generally regarded as the lesser of 2 evils to just keep things as-is.
"If that strike is destroying monuments thousands of years old and causing irreparable damage to a very fragile desert ecosystem - yes, absolutely I would be strongly against ANY entity that did that, but more importantly didn't even consider it to be a problem."
That incident was hardly the first time that Greenpeace have caused environmental damage, or destroyed goodwill towards unassociated conservation groups. Greenpeace is widely disliked in conservation circles because their extremist tactics cause far more political problems than they ever solve.
Greenpeace rapidly turned into what people I know who are involved in green organisations call "Corporate greenies" - they are very good at mediabombing and taking credit for other people's work by showing up after agreements have been signed and in several cases their antics have derailed decades of work by local conservation groups.
The membership structure is interesting to analyse too - the founders had language in articles of association which meant that subsequent members would only get voting rights after being members for a fixed period - and they've subsequently moved those goalposts repeatedly.
What Greenpeace is very good at, is raising money for Greenpeace. Everything else is a means to that end.
Most childhood-developing myopia is a result of growth factors (The eyesocket changes size and shape as you get older and the eyeball can end up with distorted curves. Only 1-2mm variation is enough to cause issues). The predominant cause is genetic, not environmental.
Anything beyond 3 meters is close enough to "infinity" as makes no odds, so "indoors" would have to be extremely claustrophobic to even factor into this.
Bookish children tend to be myopic for the simple reason that developing myopia makes dealing with outdoor sports _hard_. Before mine was picked up I hated outdoor sports such as baseball or tennis because I simply couldn't see the ball unless it was close by. Such a problem results in kids being the "last selected" for any classroom teams and so the issue becomes self-reinforcing.
"The problem is that virtually all ActiveX components are written for Windows and make Win32 calls."
Inna nutshell - yup.
This is why I've sucessfully argued with UK govt regulators that web pages which rely on ActiveX are proprietary and discriminatory - as such they are prohibited under open government rules and it's relatively easy to order govt authorities (local/national/regional) to cease using them immediately (the threat of having their funding cut off for non-compliance is the kind of thing which gets attention)
It's even more fun when having been blown off by some council manager as a "kook", you can demand (and get) an apology and climbdown.
"You can make ActiveX controls with any compiler that supports WIndows and will create DLLs with C++ calling conventions that match the MS style... So pretty much all Of them."
Back in the early 80s various friends at high school had various iterations of the Hyundai Pony and most were decade old beaters at that point.
You're not the only one who forgot Daewoo cars. They went bankrupt and are part of GM now - and that had a lot to do with the product failing crash tests worldwide.
China has such a big internal market that they're not exporting much. The market is big enough that VW, Fiat, Toyota, Nissan and Ford are all running major assembly lines in china putting together CKD kits and exporting to the rest of SE asia in association with Chinese comglomerates.
Chery anf Geely are selling in Europe (and they got 5 star ENCAP ratings for their newest products - the days of "deathtraps" are long gone) Several European makers are now wholly-owned subsidiaries of chinese companies (India owns a couple of brands too).
Slashdot Mirror
The thing about genetic variation is that there's a minimum set you need to live and extras which make it easier to survive if conditions change (as well as others which may well be negative, such as ones which predispose the carrier to nasty cancers after the reproductive period ends)
Just because you can live without them _now_ is not evidence they may not be useful later.
"Germany has 23 gigawatts of domestic solar panels, which, on a sunny day, is" NOT "sufficient to power the whole country."
There, FTFY
Germany imports a lot of nuclear power from France and having shut down its nukes now rates amongst the highest carbon emissions in the EU thanks to wholseale burning of brown coal.
The average German power draw is around 60GW, not 23. Even on a good day they need other sources. Peak is well over 80 and that happens when wind and solar tend to be at their lowest output.
"You can still deplete your supply of renewables by using more than the refill rate - at least temporarily."
back in the 70s the joke was that fossil fuels were renewable, just that we were using them up 70,000 times faster than they were being laid down.
"Hydro doesn't release greenhouse gasses"
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...
http://www.climatecentral.org/...
etc etc etc.
This was known about when I studied civil engineering 30 years ago before moving across into electrical/electronics.
Back then the levels weren't known. They've proven surprisingly high.
On top of that, all the easy hydro sites are already tapped out.
Hydro is very much a case of "it depends".
In high flow, high rainfall, heavily mountainous areas like CR, the benefits far outweigh the environmental damage - and in most cases there aren't heavily populated areas downstream if there's a damburst.
In other areas, it's the other way around.
Large shallow hydro lakes are a potent methane source.
Those "no notice" raids are fairly meticulously planned for several weeks beforehand and the units responsible repeatedly train through scenarios. They also assemble, check the surroundings and get into place before beginning the raid.
The number of shots fired in such raids averages zero. That's the target and deviating from it results in hundreds of pages of paperwork explaining why someone felt it necessary to pull a trigger.
"There clearly is because the whole concept of SWATing doesn't seem to have made it to Europe. "
European police believe in checking the area first. Going in "guns blazing" on an anonymous emergency call without validating the situation would result in serious criminal charges.
Apart from that there's the other issue I mentioned above - police have been lured into ambushes by such calls.
Unlike the USA, Europe _has_ had fascists on the streets in living memory and a long history of abuse of human rights in various countries right up to the very recent past. It's one of the reasons the freedoms europeans now have are never taken for granted.
"If you were a cop and you were sent to an address in response to a 911 call claiming that there was someone at that address with a dangerous weapon, would you walk up to the door and knock politely?"
SOP in this country is to arrive dark and scout the property/surroundings FIRST - and that's specifically because terrorists have used such calls to lure teams of police into ambushes.
Going in with lights+sirens and being blown sky-high is exactly what a domestic terrorist would love to see.
"Sure, but look at the list of charges in the summary"
SWATting is attempted murder in most jurisidctions. I'm surprised he hasn't been charged with that.
Is he suffering from Affluenza?
> To be fair, when have you seen a news report where a friend or neighbor said, 'Yeah, he was a dangerous nut job that should have been locked up years ago. it's a shame that the SWAT team didn't just kill him and save the state the trial cost'.
Yes I have, usually followed by a shitstorm targetting the media for broadcastng it - even if they were in the right and the nut was well semaphored in advance.
"I know you think that's funny, but all it would achieve is to prejudice the police, court, media and public opinion against you. "
If it is shown to prejudice the courts then your country is extremely fucked up.
"Just avoid media"
There, FTFY.
Seriously, the best line is "no comment" if you're ambushed. Media want 30 seconds of soundbite and if they can't get it they'll usually go away.
"19 is an adult. Blaming parents for the actions of a grown man is just pathetic"
There are a number of such twits around. There's even a name for them: "Sociopaths"
The Internet makes it easier to pull this kind of thing and not get caught. Dumb sociopaths with a sadistic streak (most don't have this) take advantage of this.
Sociopaths are also good at manipulating those around them - most would never suspect that XYZ is one, and quite often XYZ has no clue he (usually he) is either.
"Spying on another country has always been "illegal" in the country that is the target."
The vast majority of "spying" is done in the reading room of public libraries, reading local newspapers and the vast majority of "spies" spend their entire lives reading such things.
When it's illegal to read the local papers, let me know. It's how you gather that intelligence into a whole which matters. (The UK's intercepts of enigma crypts gathered far more information from the movements of personnell than from the actual orders in the messages, as one example)
It's a federal police/crimefighting body.
The USA equivalent to GCHQ/MI6 are the CIA and NSA.
There are two sides to the coin. All those loopholes and exemptions make the tax gathering system inefficient.
By simplifying the tax system, goverments can lower taxation rates whilst increasing their net take, due to lower compliance costs.
Fantasy? No: It's been done. http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/ta... - The Taxation system in New Zealand is one of the most efficient in the world.
It takes a strong govt with the necessary cojones to NOT give in to vested interests. New Zealand in 1984 was in an unusual position in that the incoming govt went in on a massive landslide and the previous decade's worth of vote-buying policies had effectively bankrupted the country, so the govt was able to undertake drastic reforms.
> A free market wasn't "forced" on you. Read some history. That's the way this country started.
The modern Free Market is a lot better for the overall economy than mercantilism policies of the past - which were proven to concentrate wealth and power into a few hands over a 250 year period
Free Market - means free and fair competition, not freedom from regulation.
By the way, the REAL reason for the Boston Tea party was a removal of import taxes. Smugglers bringing untaxed tea into the colonies had been making out like bandits and had large stockpiles of the contraband onhand when the import tax was suddenly removed, leaving them with the prospect of selling at a substantial loss. What was thrown in the harbour was the first shipment of legal _untaxed_ tea and it was done in order to protect the smugglers' livlihoods.
It's arguably one of the first examples of unfair market manipulation by traders and Americans celebrate it like it was a good thing.
The Free Market can only be created and maintained by govt.
Mercantilism policies of the 18th to early-20th centuries clearly show that in the absence of govt intervention, the market tends towards abusive monopolies which are anything BUT free.
The biggest problem in the USA's "free market" economy over the last 30 years has been lack of intervention to keep it free. As a result the market is inevitably moving back to mercantilism.
That route would happen to be the pan-american highway which was there before the monument was discovered by anyone outside the local area (it was the road's existence which led to the discovery. Locals of course not only knew of the monument but had been maintaining it for centuries)
Rerouting the highway has been mooted on a number of occasions but between the issue that there's not much else practically available and the fact that the road already exists and making a new one would cause more damage elsewhere, it's generally regarded as the lesser of 2 evils to just keep things as-is.
"If that strike is destroying monuments thousands of years old and causing irreparable damage to a very fragile desert ecosystem - yes, absolutely I would be strongly against ANY entity that did that, but more importantly didn't even consider it to be a problem."
That incident was hardly the first time that Greenpeace have caused environmental damage, or destroyed goodwill towards unassociated conservation groups. Greenpeace is widely disliked in conservation circles because their extremist tactics cause far more political problems than they ever solve.
Greenpeace rapidly turned into what people I know who are involved in green organisations call "Corporate greenies" - they are very good at mediabombing and taking credit for other people's work by showing up after agreements have been signed and in several cases their antics have derailed decades of work by local conservation groups.
The membership structure is interesting to analyse too - the founders had language in articles of association which meant that subsequent members would only get voting rights after being members for a fixed period - and they've subsequently moved those goalposts repeatedly.
What Greenpeace is very good at, is raising money for Greenpeace. Everything else is a means to that end.
I call "bullshit", as would my opthamologist.
Most childhood-developing myopia is a result of growth factors (The eyesocket changes size and shape as you get older and the eyeball can end up with distorted curves. Only 1-2mm variation is enough to cause issues). The predominant cause is genetic, not environmental.
Anything beyond 3 meters is close enough to "infinity" as makes no odds, so "indoors" would have to be extremely claustrophobic to even factor into this.
Bookish children tend to be myopic for the simple reason that developing myopia makes dealing with outdoor sports _hard_. Before mine was picked up I hated outdoor sports such as baseball or tennis because I simply couldn't see the ball unless it was close by. Such a problem results in kids being the "last selected" for any classroom teams and so the issue becomes self-reinforcing.
"The problem is that virtually all ActiveX components are written for Windows and make Win32 calls."
Inna nutshell - yup.
This is why I've sucessfully argued with UK govt regulators that web pages which rely on ActiveX are proprietary and discriminatory - as such they are prohibited under open government rules and it's relatively easy to order govt authorities (local/national/regional) to cease using them immediately (the threat of having their funding cut off for non-compliance is the kind of thing which gets attention)
It's even more fun when having been blown off by some council manager as a "kook", you can demand (and get) an apology and climbdown.
"You can make ActiveX controls with any compiler that supports WIndows and will create DLLs with C++ calling conventions that match the MS style ... So pretty much all Of them."
All of them that run windows, maybe.
I've yet to see DLLs in OSX or Linux.
Two decades? Try four.
Back in the early 80s various friends at high school had various iterations of the Hyundai Pony and most were decade old beaters at that point.
You're not the only one who forgot Daewoo cars. They went bankrupt and are part of GM now - and that had a lot to do with the product failing crash tests worldwide.
China has such a big internal market that they're not exporting much. The market is big enough that VW, Fiat, Toyota, Nissan and Ford are all running major assembly lines in china putting together CKD kits and exporting to the rest of SE asia in association with Chinese comglomerates.
Chery anf Geely are selling in Europe (and they got 5 star ENCAP ratings for their newest products - the days of "deathtraps" are long gone)
Several European makers are now wholly-owned subsidiaries of chinese companies (India owns a couple of brands too).